


zero hour nine a.m.

by adreadfulidea



Category: Mad Men
Genre: 1960's Politics, Disability, F/M, M/M, Multi, Other, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protesting, Vietnam War AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-23
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2018-09-26 10:23:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 25,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9889673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreadfulidea/pseuds/adreadfulidea
Summary: Ginsberg goes to war. Most of him comes back.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, the genesis of this story is somewhere back in the hot n' heavy theorizing days of seasons five and six, when people were speculating that the anti-war (and anti-violence, really) Ginsberg might get drafted. The idea started then and grew in my head until it became a much longer story than I was telling at the time. I kept putting it off, telling myself I would write it in full and make it perfect before anything was posted. Of course we all know how that goes. It might be slow going, maybe a chapter a month, but I'm never going to get anything done if I don't just start writing the thing.
> 
> Hopefully I can do this idea justice.
> 
> Shouldn't be too many graphic depictions of violence in here - the bulk of the action takes place post-war - but I tagged it just in case. Title comes from the Elton John song Rocket Man.

 

 

He left two fingers behind in Vietnam, but that wasn’t all.

“So I hear you’re going home,” said the nurse who was changing his dressings, the ones wrapped around his calf where they had cut the shrapnel out of him. “You must be excited.”

There was a fly buzzing around his cot; it landed on his arm and walked, feather light, up to his bandaged hand. He didn’t brush it away.

“Sure,” he said. “Excited.”

 

 

His father was waiting for him at the bus station. He had wanted to sleep on the way into the city but hadn’t been able to; instead he watched family sedans and long-haul truckers and girls in convertibles roll past with equal disinterest.

Ginsberg braced himself against the folded-up doors of the bus as he stepped out into the late afternoon sunshine, putting most of the weight on his good leg. He was still limping noticeably but the doctors told him that would get better with time. It wasn’t as serious an injury as it might have been. He’d gotten lucky, they said.

His shaking hands they couldn’t explain. That was in his head - psychosomatic, which was medical jargon for _we don’t fucking know_ \- and not because of the missing fingers. Besides, his left was fine, and it still trembled just as badly. When he ate his breakfast this morning, the fork balanced precariously in an unfamiliar grip; when he’d taken his painkillers just afterwards; and now, when he hoisted his bag up to his shoulder and turned towards the building.

He stuffed his mangled hand with its sawed-off knuckles into his pocket. It wasn’t clear how much Pop knew and they would have to deal with the facts sooner or later, but not while surrounded by happy reunions.

Morris was in the middle of a fairly large crowd. There were a lot of soldiers coming in and so a lot of families waiting. A guy walking behind Ginsberg broke into a run at the sight of his wife; a little girl brushed past him on the way to her Daddy’s arms. Just like in the movies. Morris craned his neck, trying to see his son.

He stood as if frozen once he did. Ginsberg had been expecting it. He knew he what he looked like, how drawn his face was, how dark the circles under his eyes had gotten. He more closely resembled a man who had been ill than one who had been injured, he thought, though maybe there was no difference. A total scarecrow either way. And he hadn’t shaved since he’d gotten back. He was having a hard time holding the razor steady.

Morris waved his arms over his head as though he could possibly be missed. Ginsberg forced a smile onto his face.

“Hey,” he said, and stopped just in front of his father. He tried to think of something else - something meaningful, that would be remembered. There was nothing in his head but static. Hard to believe that he made a living off his words, once.

Morris swept him into a hug all the same. He didn’t care.

Ginsberg hunched his shoulders reflexively. He didn’t mean to, it just happened. Morris pulled back, his hands on Ginsberg’s arms, and gave him a confused look.

“You okay?” he asked.

“‘Course,” said Ginsberg, dropping his eyes to the ground and cramming his hand deeper into his pocket. Pop had new shoes on - of course he had new shoes, it had been a year. What a stupid thing to think.

“You seem - nevermind, it doesn’t matter.” Morris beamed down at him. “You’re home.”

“I am,” said Ginsberg, and made himself smile again. “We should get going. You take the train down, or are you paying for parking?”

“Borrowed the Patel’s car for the day. We can go anywhere you’d like.”

“I only want to go back to the apartment.”

“You sure?” said Morris. “Not even out to eat? I’ll pay for someplace nice. We’re celebrating.”

Ginsberg’s stomach turned over. He hadn’t eaten since that morning but he was having trouble keeping food down and wanted to put off his next meal for as long as possible. “I’m not hungry.”

Morris frowned, and Ginsberg expected some comment about how he was getting to be too skinny. But in the end Morris didn’t bring it up; instead he shrugged and said, “If you don’t want to, fine. It’s up to you.”

“Maybe later,” Ginsberg hedged, though he had no intentions of following through.

“Here,” said Morris, and reached for the strap of the duffel. “Let me take that.”

Ginsberg’s fingers tightened around it and they engaged in a brief and futile tug of war. “I don’t need - I _got_ it, would you stop?”

“Okay,” said Morris, dropping his arm to his side. He sounded hurt.

Ginsberg closed his eyes. Back five minutes and he was already fucking up. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. It’s been a long day - I’m tired.”

“We’ll go straight home,” said Morris decisively. He put a guiding hand on Ginsberg’s back and steered him in the direction of the exit. “You can lie down, have a good long sleep.”

The Patel’s car was a rusty green Studebaker, at least fifteen years old and bought secondhand. Ginsberg dropped his bag into the backseat and climbed in the front next to Morris.

“You wanna drive?” Morris asked.

“No,” said Ginsberg. He slouched back against the seat, letting go of the rigid posture the military had drilled into him.

Morris nudged him with an elbow. “It was a joke, kiddo. Like I was going to let you drive.”

Ginsberg rolled down the window as they moved into traffic. He did it with his right hand, unthinking - even with the ring and pinky fingers gone it was still his instinct to use his dominant hand more often than not - and Morris slammed on the brakes.

“What the hell?” Ginsberg asked, throwing out an arm to prevent himself from smacking into the dash.

“They told me you got wounded in action,” said Morris, “but that you were gonna be okay. They never said anything about _this_.”

“I _was_ wounded in action,” Ginsberg said. “In the leg and the...” he held up his hand, looking at the blank spaces where part of his body used to be, and then dropped it uselessly into his lap, “... hand, obviously. It could’ve been worse.”

It could have been in the spine, or the head, or the gut; bleeding out slowly with no way to stop it.

“It’s over with,” said Ginsberg. “It can’t be changed. There’s no use in talking about it. We need to move, you’re blocking traffic.”

Morris hit the gas at the same time he gave Ginsberg a long, concerned look; Ginsberg wanted to tell him to keep his eyes on the damn road but he kept his treacherous mouth shut. He was so temperamental lately, rocketing between numb and furious at a moment’s notice. He wouldn’t let it ruin anything between him and his father. He wouldn’t.

The apartment was exactly the same. He circled it looking for differences. The bathroom was unaltered right down to the water damage on the ceiling, the couch was still full of so many broken springs that it felt like a sack of marbles, and Pop’s chair sat right in front of the T.V. where he liked it. Ginsberg straightened the frame of a picture that was hanging on the wall. Him and Pop at their citizenship ceremony, grinning like loons. He opened the curtains in his bedroom, kicking up dust, and set his bag on his bed. The comforter was the one he had always used, and his work shoes were poking out from under the desk where he had left them. There was even an old Bob Dylan poster taped to the back of the door; he picked at a torn corner and decided to leave the room before nostalgia could swamp him.

He walked into the kitchen, popped the lid off the tin of coffee and inhaled deeply. “I missed this,” he said.

Morris laughed. He was sitting at the kitchen table, watching Ginsberg get reacquainted. His face was positively glowing and for a second everything felt fine, totally normal like it used to.

“You think I’m kidding?” said Ginsberg. “I’ve dreamt about a decent cup of coffee.”

“Then sit down and let me make you some,” said Morris, and Ginsberg did, perfectly okay with being fussed over for once.

“You go on and get some rest,” said Morris as they drank their coffee. Black with sugar, the way Ginsberg had been having it since he was old enough to drink the stuff. “You’ll be feeling yourself in no time.”

 

 

That night was the first time he woke his father up by having a screaming nightmare. It wasn’t the last.

 

 

“Again?” his father asked the third night he came into the bathroom to find Ginsberg dry-heaving over the toilet. He said it sad and gentle, with his palm pressed between Ginsberg’s shoulderblades and then the back of his hand against his sweaty forehead. He used to check for fevers that way.

Ginsberg cringed away, his skin crawling. He didn’t like being touched after the dreams.

“You need water,” Morris said, and went into the kitchen to get some cold from the fridge.

He hadn’t thrown up anything except stomach acid but his mouth tasted terrible. The porcelain of the toilet was cool against his overheated back; he leaned against it and thought of hot nights and mosquitoes and the splash of mud against his face. But that made him feel sick again, so he got to his feet and looked at himself in the mirror.

It was a cheap mirror, and not flattering. The color pulled slightly yellow from the lightbulb overhead; the reflection was always blurred. He had seen himself in it in every mood and situation under the sun. Never had he looked like this.

He turned the tap on all the way and stuck his head under. Let the water soak his hair, run into his ears, pour into his nose and mouth until he was coughing, spitting it up.

Water dripped down his shoulders as he straightened his back, the faucet still roaring away. He wheezed heavily around the burn in his throat and couldn’t see his reflection anymore. His eyes were wet and streaming.

“Michael,” his father said.

Ginsberg turned around, scrubbing his forearm across his eyes to clear them. Morris stood in the doorway and held up a glass.

“I guess you don’t need this,” he said.

 

 

He heard them before he saw them, first the stairs creaking under their feet and then voices that were supposed to be hushed but carried much further than they suspected.

“ ...but what if it’s his face? What do I do then?” Peggy asked.

“You go in there and make nice,” Stan snapped. “What the hell else would you do?”

“I don’t know, Stan. That’s why I _asked_.”

Ginsberg recognized that tone from their days working together; an explosion was imminent. He decided to save them from themselves and opened the door.

They stopped short. Peggy’s mouth was still open for yelling; she closed it with an embarrassed wince.

“Hey, buddy,” Stan said, way too cheerful for the occasion.

The last time he had seen them together they were standing at his door in just this way, every bit as awkward. They came down to see him before he left for basic and sat in the apartment trying to make small talk. Jokes about his ugly military haircut, the one he gave himself (he didn’t want the hands of strangers on him, he didn’t want whatever fucking bonding experience that was supposed to provide), promises to write. The similarities gave him a powerful sense of deja vu, like he was waking up from a dream he couldn’t shake off. The familiar contours of his room made alien by the cover of darkness. He had the strangest urge to reach out and touch Stan to make sure he was actually there.

He didn’t, though. He wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t _that_ crazy.

Peggy had been very quiet, that day. He never understood why she made a point of saying goodbye in the first place. She didn’t like him.

The way she was looking him over bordered on panic, her eyes roaming from the top of his head down to his kneecaps like she was afraid of finding something important missing. He waited for her to notice the hand but she never did. Instead she shoved the casserole dish she was holding at him.

“Welcome home,” she said. “Um. I hope you’re feeling better.”

He peeled back the tinfoil. It had marshmallows on top.

“I thought people only made these on Thanksgiving,” he said. “But thanks.”

“Is your Dad here?” she asked as he put her casserole in the fridge. She asked it like she hoped the answer would be yes, and he couldn’t blame her. He didn’t want to be alone with himself either.

“No,” he said. “He’s at work.”

Pop hadn’t wanted to go - had, in fact, taken a couple of days off work to stay home. But they didn’t have the wiggle room to lose any more money. Not with one of them unemployed. Ginsberg had been told that he might be eligible for some kind of pension from the army but it hadn’t materialized yet. Pop kept bugging him to go down the VA and talk to somebody. “They owe you,” he said, uncharacteristically blunt. But the last thing Ginsberg wanted to do was sit in a windowless room with a bunch of other traumatized soldiers, waiting for a man from the government to tell him no.

He watched television all day instead, lying on the couch, too exhausted from sleepless nights to do anything else. When he was lucky he passed out and woke up at the sound of his father’s key in the door. When he wasn’t he would pry himself out of the cushions before Pop arrived, try and do something with his hair, to remember if he’d brushed his teeth, to act like he’d done something useful with his day.

Occasionally he saw one of his commercials. Clorox bleach or ice cream or resort vacations. It was surreal. He was a time traveller, looking into a past he no longer recognized.

“Why aren’t you two at the office?” he asked. “McCann fire you, or something?”

Peggy laughed, the sound as weak as watered-down dive bar liquor. She tangled her fingers with Stan’s, on the top of the table. “No,” she said. “I was looking at apartments. Stan came along to help.”

“Don’t you have a place?”

“I’m selling it,” she said. “Being a landlady is a pain in the ass.”

“Are you moving in together?” he asked, which was followed by a ringing silence. They looked at each other.

“We’re not -” Peggy said. “I’m mean we haven’t been together that long -”

“Jesus, Ginzo,” said Stan. “Let me buy the woman dinner first.”

“A lot of people won’t sell to a single woman,” Peggy said. “So we were - pretending. It might help.” Stan gave her a look, inscrutable.

He reached into his shirt pocket and got out a pack of cigarettes. It turned out to contain grass instead, a few thinly rolled joints. “You mind, buddy?” he asked.

“Open a window,” Ginsberg said. “I don’t want my father smelling it.”

They propped the living room window open - it was broken so you had to use a stick, kept in the windowsill for that purpose - only it turned out Stan had forgotten his lighter, too. He was so annoyed that Ginsberg went and got him the one that Morris had hidden behind the spices on the rack, along with the Camels he wasn’t supposed to be smoking but still snuck on occasion anyway.

“Here,” he said, and slid it across the table to Stan.

“Thanks,” said Stan, and it took him a couple of tries to light up properly. He was nervous. Maybe it was because he’d noticed Ginsberg’s hand.

Ginsberg saw him do it. The arrested expression on his face, there and then just as quickly dismissed. He had determined to be normal. Ginsberg had a small moment of relief that flared and burned out the way a dying ember did. The clouds descended once again. He decided he didn’t care what Stan’s reaction was, or Peggy’s, or anyone. He was already tired of being told he should feel grateful.

“Do you need help with anything?” Peggy asked, not unkindly. “I can help you find work, if you want. Or Stan can take you anywhere you need to go. He has a car, now.”

“I can do everything myself except count to ten,” Ginsberg said, and held up his hand with all three remaining fingers spread. Peggy flushed dark across her cheekbones, and he immediately felt sick and ashamed. Why had he done that? She was only trying to be nice.

He watched Stan cup her elbow and give it a comforting squeeze. It was strangely intimate, a thing he shouldn’t have seen, and certainly shouldn’t be dwelling on. He looked away.

“Your Dad told me you hurt your leg,” said Stan.

“You talk to my father?” Ginsberg asked.

“Sure do,” Stan said. “Somebody had to look out for him while you were gone.”

“Oh,” said Ginsberg, horrified to find himself choking up. He couldn’t stop it; suddenly he was fighting off tears, his face crumpling, biting the insides of his cheeks to try and make them stop like he did when he was a child. A slow and ugly collapse. He covered his face with his hands, desperate to regain control. It would stop in a minute. It would.

“Michael?” Peggy asked. She sounded scared. “Are you okay?” When she tried to touch his arm he jerked backwards so fast that the chair legs squeaked against the floor.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

(If he said it enough it would eventually be true. He was home, and he was okay. He was home, and he was okay -)

“You sure about that?” Stan asked. The joint had been forgotten in his hand, half gone to ash. The cherry was perilously close to touching skin. Ginsberg had the urge to snatch it up, throw it on the ground.

“Yes,” he said, more decisively. He sniffed and rubbed the side of his sleeve against his wet cheeks. He couldn’t do this. He’d thought -

“But I need to go lay down,” he said. “I didn’t sleep last night. You have to leave.” It wasn’t polite and it wasn’t appropriate; it was all he could manage. “Thank you for coming,” he managed to force out, a tacked-on replacement for an apology that didn’t make anything better.

But they didn’t get mad, neither of them. “Might not be a bad idea,” said Stan. “Want me to stop by the store, get you some NyQuil?”

“We have some.” Which was a falsehood, but he wanted to be alone as quickly as possible.

Stan let Peggy leave first. “Be down in a sec,” he said, and shut the door behind her. Then he turned to Ginsberg and put a hand on his shoulder.

“I want you to call me if anything goes wrong,” he said.

Ginsberg tried to shrug him off. He wouldn’t budge. “Stan -”

“Ginzo,” he said. Ginsberg had never heard him be so serious, not once. “Promise me, okay?”

Ginsberg looked down at his bare feet, his old threadbare socks. He wouldn’t look Stan in the face and lie to him. “I promise,” he said.

 

 

He was scraping Peggy’s casserole into the garbage when Morris came back with a grocery bag propped against his shoulder and the mail tucked under his arm. “Who gave you that?” he asked, and pushed his shoulder against the door to close it.

“Nobody,” said Ginsberg. He put the empty dish into the sink and turned the water on, so hard that the roar of it drowned out everything else.

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

 

Ginsberg did strange things, those first couple of months back in New York. He rode the bus around in circles until they kicked him off. He sat on the bathroom floor and counted the tiles for forty minutes, one night after his nightmare arrived right on schedule. He skipped meals. The television was always too loud. He asked his father if they could get another deadbolt (three and counting) and he dragged his bed across the room so he could sleep facing the door.

Morris sent him down the street for groceries one night, and he didn’t come back for three hours.

He was supposed to go for eggs and milk. Just eggs and milk; that was all.

But Seidelman’s wasn’t there anymore. He stood on the sidewalk, staring at the laundromat that had replaced it, at a loss. “Where -” he said, and caught at the arm of a young hippie that was going in, his clothes stuffed into a hefty bag. “Excuse me,” he said. “But do you know where Seidelman’s went? It used to be right here.”

The guy looked at him in confusion. He was wearing a fringed jacket, like the one Stan had. “What?”

“The corner store,” Ginsberg said. “It was here, it’s been here since before I was born.”

“Moved, I guess,” the guy said with a shrug. “Or closed. You okay, man? Bad trip?”

Ginsberg backed off, his stomach turning with embarrassment. “Forget it,” he said, and kept walking down the street. It couldn’t have gone far, he reasoned. It was a neighborhood institution.

But he kept noticing changes, every place he let his eyes rest. A Chinese restaurant had become a shoe store, the red Mandarin-inflected banner above the window washed over in cool blue neon. A flower shop in place of a deli, riots of bright petals in the front window instead of cuts of chicken and beef. They were constructing a new fire station. The benches at the bus stops had been painted. He started to feel like he’d walked into a stranger’s home by accident. I don’t recognize this, he kept thinking. I don’t know where I am.

He kept touching the back of his neck, because it was tingling. Like being watched, like knowing there was someone out there -

( - it didn’t matter how fast you ran, it didn’t _matter_ -)

\- and you couldn’t see them. You couldn’t see them, so you couldn’t get away from them. He got on a bus, with the vague excuse of finding another grocery store. But then he transferred to the subway and he just -

\- he just kept going. Wound up like a clockwork toy. He couldn’t stop himself.

Midtown Manhattan rose ahead of him, towers of cold glass and steel. They blocked out the stars. Ginsberg took one step, then another, and stood in the middle of the sidewalk with his eyes closed. Someone bumped into him, cursing. The city opened up and sucked him in like a great black lung.

Somehow he ended up on Sixth Avenue, and then in the lobby of the Time-Life building. But of course he did - where else would he have gone? This was always where he was headed, pulled along like a magnet. Seeking his true north.

It was quiet and empty. He sat down, his back against the wall, between the elevators. Muscle memory compelled him to get up, to go inside and hit the right buttons. A coffee from the cart outside, maybe a danish in the morning. Hoping no one would notice the new patch on the sleeve of his jacket. He imagined that he could do it again, that a few steps from the elevator doors he would find the agency in full swing: chaotic, awful, wonderful. Don riding everyone’s ass, Roger telling terrible jokes. But there was nothing left, no place to welcome him. SCDP didn’t exist anymore.

A security guard swinging a flashlight came around the corner, startled into silence at his sudden appearance. For a moment they looked at each other.

“You aren’t supposed to be here,” he said.

“I know,” Ginsberg said, and left.

The world outside was as dark and lonely as it had always been. Had he ever thought any different? He couldn’t remember.

The night was getting chilly, and he wasn’t wearing a jacket. It was time to go home; he needed to go home. Pop must be getting worried. Then he saw a flash of deep, living green peering out between the buildings. He headed towards it.

Central Park was a lot more active at night than he recalled. When he was little his father would bring him down during the day to get fresh air or play on the carousel. It always sort of scared him, those horses with their bared teeth. He didn’t like getting on them. But he had never told Morris that. In those days they could barely speak to each other, both stumbling through the foreign topography of English. Sometimes he wondered how they survived.

He had loved the trees, though. One time Morris caught him hugging one, his cheek pressed against the bark. He’d been pretending to talk to it or some stupid kid stuff. And the rolling lawns, leaves crunching under his feet in fall, slipping on the grass in spring.

Like everything else it wasn’t the same. There were guys cruising - Stan, of all people, had taught him that term - sneaking off behind the bushes, seeking what little privacy they could. Or not bothering. He interrupted a very intimate scene behind the toilets and rushed off with a red face. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, blocking out their images with a raised hand. Why they hell wouldn’t they just go inside?

He knew he could find some himself, if he wanted. Not that he knew how to go about it, really - sex was still as much a mystery to him as a Raymond Chandler with the end torn out. But other people managed, and he wasn’t afraid of his own desires like he used to be. The war had burned that out of him. There were worse things to be.

Maybe he would have, under better circumstances. It would be - something. A distraction, an attempt at connection.

(Before he left New York he had gone to a bar, one of _those_ bars, and lingered outside like a lost dog. No one wanted to die a virgin. He couldn’t bring himself to go in. Now he wished he had. It might have been his last chance.)

What would he do if someone touched him?

He walked until his leg started cramping too badly to continue. The ground was freezing when he lay down on it, but it smelled of new clover. He could stay here, he thought, and play dead for a while. Only until he felt better. But his leg was bothering him too much to truly rest. He pressed down with the heel of his hand, rubbing sore muscle and scar tissue. He drew in a couple of deep breaths and tried to close up the hole in his chest. It ached there, too, tight and ugly. Like he’d been running for too long.

He put a hand over his heart. How strange that it was still beating.

 

 

Ginsberg had overstrained himself badly. He had a hard time getting up the stairs when he got home, gripping the railing hard and limping along with gritted teeth. They creaked ponderously under his feet. It sounded like the score of a horror movie; labored breathing, whining stairs - all he was missing was a musical accompaniment. There was mud soaked through the back of his shirt and the seat of his pants. He would have to change before he could sit down.

Morris was waiting up for him. He was furious, and terrified.

“Where have you _been_?” he shouted, as soon as his son came through the door. “I got half the neighborhood looking for you! I called the fucking police!”

Ginsberg started. Morris rarely yelled. “I was - did they do anything about it?”

“Who?”

“The police.”

“Of course they didn’t, Michael!” Morris said. “You’re a grown man. They thought I was some senile old fool, losing my son in the cracks in the sidewalk, making up stories in my head. Where did you _go_?”

“For a walk,” he said. “For a walk, that’s all. I couldn’t find Siedelman’s. I’m sorry.” He took the money Morris had given him out of his wallet and tried to give it back. But Pop wouldn’t take it. Something in his expression made Ginsberg feel sick.

“Michael,” he said, low and rattled. “That doesn’t make sense. You aren’t making sense. You were gone for hours.”

Ginsberg put the money down on the kitchen table. “It’s what happened,” he said. “I don’t know what else to tell you. I lost track of time.” He tried to shift his weight to the ball of his foot. It still hurt. “I gotta clean up,” he said. “Get out of these clothes.”

His father raised a hand like he wanted to touch him, to stop him, but he didn’t. It fell to his side and curled into a loose fist. “I thought maybe -”

“What?”

Morris swallowed. “I thought maybe you hurt yourself,” he said, gruffly, and then added, “in an accident. Stepped in front of car, or - I don’t know.”

Ginsberg looked at him, hollow as a broken bell. They both knew he hadn’t been worried about an accident. “Why would I do that?” he asked, and turned away.

He wasn’t stupid enough to try and stand up to shower. In the bath, his dirty clothes all over the floor, he noticed a tinny taste on his tongue and a twinge in his cheek. When he put his fingers in his mouth they came back tainted with red. He’d bitten himself without noticing it. He washed his hands off, scrubbing under his nails aggressively, but it was too late. They had already started to shake, and sinking under the water didn’t do anything at all.

 

 

The next day Ginsberg was sitting on the couch, leg stiff and cheek swollen, when there was a knock at his door. He wasn’t expecting anyone, so he didn’t get up to answer it.

But the knocking continued and got loud enough that he couldn’t ignore it. If it was disturbing him, then it was disturbing the neighbors. He staggered towards the door with a frustrated sigh. It better not be a fucking salesman someone let in the building again.

It wasn’t. Stan grinned at him from the hallway. He was holding a bag, and whatever it was in it smelled great.

“You’re supposed to be at work,” Ginsberg pointed out.

“Thanks Mom,” Stan scoffed. “You gonna tell on me to the teacher, too?” He pushed past, no invitation needed. “Got any beer?”

Ginsberg closed and locked the door. “No,” he said. “Neither me or Pop drink enough to have it in the house.”

“Water’ll do,” said Stan. He was moving through the kitchen like he lived there, getting plates and cutlery out, checking for a water jug in the fridge. It occurred to Ginsberg that he must have been here many times alone, seeing to Morris, following the same pattern he did now. Bringing food or helping out with chores. Maybe even giving Morris money if things were tight, the way Ginsberg used to before everything went to hell. Hoping for good news, or any news at all.

Stan caught him looking. “What?” he asked, a smile drifting across his face. “Is my slip showing?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t write,” Ginsberg said.

Stan shrugged. “I never blamed you. It must have been hard, out there. I probably wouldn’t have either.”

“Still,” Ginsberg said. “I said I was gonna. It was just -”

“Hey,” said Stan. “It’s fine, man. You had bigger things on your mind.”

And for him that seemed to be it. For Stan it usually was. He didn’t waste time on the should’ve beens. Once, deeply stoned, he’d quoted Isaiah at him: “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.” And then he’d laughed, the way he often did when he was high, over the strangest things. A forward moving machine. Ginsberg envied him. He was either lodged in concrete or floating through space. There was no happy medium.

Stan took out styrofoam containers and packets of sauce. “Chinese?” Ginsberg asked, and he nodded.

“I brought enough for your Dad, too,” he said. “You can give it to him later.”

“He’ll appreciate that,” said Ginsberg. Abruptly he realized he should do something, so he rustled up some ice cubes for the water and a couple of clean glasses. When they crossed paths Stan stopped him by putting a couple of fingers under his chin, lifted it so he could get a better look. Ginsberg stood rabbit-frozen, waiting to see what came next.

“What happened?” Stan asked. “Toothache?”

“Bit myself,” Ginsberg said. “Chewing gum incident.”

“Be careful eating,” said Stan. “You already look kinda chipmunk-y on that side.”

“Thank you, Stan,” said Ginsberg. “I couldn’t see that, looking in the mirror this morning.”

“Nice to see the war didn’t dull your sarcasm,” said Stan. “Here, catch.” He tossed a fortune cookie over, which Ginsberg only just managed to grab. “What does it say?”

“You’re supposed to open them after the meal.”

“You know they don’t have those in China, right?” Stan asked. “You can eat them whenever, there’s no tradition.”

“They taste like cardboard,” he said, and snapped the cookie open. It fell to pieces in his hand, the slip of paper inside curled in the shape of a snail shell. He smoothed the paper out against his palm.

“Well?”

“Nothing,” said Ginsberg. “It doesn’t say anything.” The fortune was blank.

 

 

Stan didn’t go home once they were done eating. He hung out in the living room with Ginsberg - not like there was much else to do - and they watched television.

“Isn’t this the soap Megan used to be on?” he asked, when Ginsberg changed the channel to something where women in glittery outfits were pulling at each other’s hair. There was a smashed champagne bottle on the floor and the room they were in looked like a haunted hotel.

Ginsberg squinted at the screen. “I think so.”

“Clearly she really missed out.”

“Wonder what happened to her,” Ginsberg said, heading back to the couch. “I always liked Megan.”

“Maybe you should’ve given it a shot,” said Stan. “She wasn’t very happy with Don.”

“I didn’t mean that way,” Ginsberg complained. He stretched out on his side of the sofa, bad leg up on the cushions. “Why have you got to make everything perverted?”

“It’s my most consistent talent,” Stan said. “Besides, Megan’s fine. She’s in the movies now. I saw her in one last week.”

“I - really?”

“You surprised?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Most people who want to be movie stars don’t get to be, I suppose. Was she good? I never saw her act.”

“It was about a commune,” said Stan. “On some farm. Lots of wheat fields and crumbling architecture, lots of drugs and fucking until everything inevitably falls apart. Arthouse, you know? Her hair was really long but I think it was a wig. I didn’t recognize her at first, so I guess that means she was good.”

“Some people have all the luck, huh?”

“I almost went to LA,” said Stan. “Few years ago when SCDP was opening that second store.”

Ginsberg looked at him. He’d never heard anything about that. “Why didn’t you?”

“Don cut me out. He said he was gonna go out there - this was before Megan did. But he stayed. Ted went, and apparently hated it the whole time.”

“Jesus,” said Ginsberg. “Fucking Don. What a prick.”

“Yeah,” said Stan, and laughed. “And now I’ve seen his wife’s tits.”

“ _No_.”

“Yup,” he said, smugly. “And so did Peggy, because I saw it with her.”

“Oh my _god_ ,” said Ginsberg. “What did she say?”

Stan raised his eyebrows. “Can’t tell you. She’ll kill me.”

Ginsberg sat up straight. “You have to,” he said, and poked Stan in the arm. “Stan. Stan, come on -”

“She said -” He paused for effect. “She said: ‘it’s not like I never thought about it’.”

Ginsberg laughed. It was a big laugh, spontaneous, and the first time he had done so since getting back from Vietnam. Possibly since leaving New York, heading south for training on a bus with a bunch of other grunts. And god, god it felt so good.

“Holy shit,” he wheezed out.

“I won’t ever get to the bottom of that woman,” said Stan. “I swear.”

“You must be glad you never went to LA,” said Ginsberg. “Not with the agency folding.”

Stan shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It would be - different.” He went quiet, for a minute. “At McCann I don’t think they even notice if I’m there or not. I’m a hired hand. It’s not like having your own shop.”

Ginsberg had never been inside McCann. The collapse of Sterling Cooper happened after he was already gone. His life had been dismantled before the agency was. He knew some people had lost their jobs. But he didn’t know who, and it was hard to invest in. He would have cared if _Stan_ had, but -

He didn’t have a lot of friends.

(Who would have mourned him, if he hadn’t come home?)

Ginsberg rubbed the sore muscles in his leg, absently. He didn’t notice Stan watching him; he didn’t notice him moving. Not until he felt a hand next to his, and jumped.

“Let me take a look at that,” Stan said.

“What are you gonna do about it?” Ginsberg asked.

Stan dragged his leg over. “I did a lot of sports, Ginzo. I know something about injuries.” He slid his hand up Ginsberg’s calf, pressing down.

Ginsberg winced, trying to jerk away. “Fuck,” he cursed. “What’re you doing, that hurts!”

“You’re all seized up,” Stan said. “Didn’t the doctor give you exercises to do?”

“I don’t know,” said Ginsberg. He lay back, biting his lip against the discomfort. “I don’t remember.”

“For Christ’s sake,” said Stan.

He dug his fingers in, hard, but it had gone from pain to a weird, deep kind of ache that wasn’t at all unpleasant. Ginsberg’s face flushed. His body wanted to react in a million different ways, and at least one of them was wildly inappropriate. To prevent a disaster, he made his mind completely blank; imagining nurses with cruel hands, a sterile and icy medical office. He was careful not to look at Stan. But he couldn’t stop himself from heating up. It was like being thirteen years old all over again, hormones trembling along his nerves every second. The rigidity in his leg loosened up, all the way down to his toes.

“See?” said Stan. “Not so bad, you big baby.”

Ginsberg cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “Um -”

His didn’t know what he was going to say, and he didn’t get to decide. Morris opened the door, and he froze.

“Afternoon, Mr. G,” Stan said, calm like getting caught with his hand halfway up Ginsberg’s pant leg was totally normal. “There’s food in the fridge if you want it.”

 

 

Stan left not long after that. Ginsberg retreated to his bedroom, unable to bear his father’s eyes on him or the questions that might result. He wasn’t ready to -

He just wasn’t ready. Not yet.

(He kept the blank fortune in his wallet for the next week, though he couldn’t have said why. But there was something coming. He was sure of it.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A day late and a dollar short but at least it's done.

 

 

 

The most embarrassing aspect of the whole fiasco was that when his draft notice showed up, Ginsberg still thought he would be okay.

He worried about everything. He worried about getting fired. He worried he was never going to get married. He worried he would be a bad husband. He worried he was a bad person. He worried about being attracted to men. He worried about being attracted to women. He worried the city was getting too dangerous. He worried about Morris getting old. He worried about the Soviets and their nukes.

But he didn’t worry about being ordered to report to the armed forces. He wasn’t the only Michael Ginsberg on the Lower East Side, and he was too old for the draft.

His father had gone gray in the face. He had a bad habit of opening Ginsberg’s mail - or he’d done it on purpose, seen the postmark and assumed the worst. He stumbled into a chair, blindly staring at the paper in his hand. “No,” he said. “It can’t be.”

“Pop?” Ginsberg called out, scared. He jumped to his feet from where he’d been flipping through a magazine on the floor and ran over. Was Morris sick? Was it a heart attack, was it -

“Michael,” said his father. “Look. I - how can this happen?”

Ginsberg took the letter from him. He read it over. Then he read it again.

“Pop,” he said. “It’s a mistake.”

“What?” his father said. “How could it be?” He was so distressed that his hands, clutched in front of him, were trembling.

“Because I’m not young enough to be eligible,” Ginsberg said. He got his father a glass of water and made him drink it. That _look_ on his face - Ginsberg didn’t want to see anything like it ever again. He tried to calm his own racing heart, pressing the heel of his hand against his chest.

“Are you sure? How can you be sure?” Morris kept saying, over and over again. He wasn’t convinced, and Ginsberg felt a shadow of that doubt try and reach him. He wouldn’t allow it.

“I’ll go down straight down tomorrow,” he said. “It’s a paperwork error. Everything’ll get straightened out. You’ll see.”

He lay awake that night, but not too badly. Not as bad as it could have been. It was simply too ridiculous to even think -

It was an annoyance, that was all. Another stupid tack thrown in his path. He knew how to deal with that.

Ginsberg slept in a deep and untroubled way. He didn’t have any dreams, not a single one.

 

 

At the processing station he spoke to a woman in military dress who was staffing the front desk. “They really make you wear that all the time, huh?” he said.

He told her his problem and she directed him to a waiting area in another part of the building. It was a series of gray and nondescript rooms with pictures of soldiers on the walls from previous wars. The second world war seemed to be of particular interest. Ginsberg wondered if any of the people working there recalled that America hadn’t bothered to join up until they got attacked themselves.

The guy who called Ginsberg into his office was named Sanders. He knew that for sure. The rest he couldn’t remember, no matter how hard he tried, because of what happened next. Not what his rank was - Corporal? Sargeant? Not what his face looked like, or which uniform he had on. Not if there were pictures on his desk of a wife or kids or a favorite dog. It had all blurred together, featureless and terrifying. A roar in his ears, his hands going numb with panic. Like getting horrible news at the doctor’s office.

They shook hands at first, cordially. Ginsberg sat down and produced his draft card and all the ID he had, like he had been instructed to.

“My problem,” he said, “is that I got this in the mail, and I know it can’t be right. And I know you like to be accurate, in the military, so I figured I would come down and tell you.”

Right off the bat he was disbelieved. But he had been expecting that. Sanders read over his documentation with a raised eyebrow. He let Ginsberg sweat it out, in no hurry to actually address the issue.

“How is it wrong?” he asked, finally.

“I wasn’t born in ‘45,” Ginsberg said, tapping the edge of the paper. “That’s the cut off, right? 1945. I was born at least a couple of years before that. Maybe more.” He’d been a pretty underfed kid. Who knows - his age could have been estimated wrong.

“You wouldn’t have received this if you weren’t the right age,” Sanders said. “Frankly, you’re late reporting already. Didn’t you watch the lottery?”

“No,” said Ginsberg, slowly. “Because there was no point. I’m too old to be drafted. You understand? Look. I get that a lot of people come down here and try and lie, but I’m not -”

“Mr. Ginsberg -”

“- but I swear on my life I’m not doing that,” Ginsberg said. “I just wanna get this straightened out. So we can both go on with our days. I’m a very honest person, really.”

“What did you mean when you said ‘at least a couple of years before that? Do you not _know_?”

Sanders said it like it was an impossibility, like people came into the world knowing when their birthday was. You don’t know if nobody tells you. You don’t know if there is no one left who can. No, he didn’t _know_.

“I was adopted,” he said. “From Sweden, after the war. I’m an orphan. The records weren’t very good in those days.”

“Then how can you say you aren’t young enough?” Sanders asked. “If you aren’t sure yourself?”

Ginsberg laughed, sort of, a sound without humor. He could feel his face going tight, frozen - what was happening? What was _happening_?

“Come on,” he said, past the lump in his throat. “I’m pushing thirty. I’m not a kid.”

“What does your birth certificate say?” Sanders asked. “And why didn’t you bring it?”

“I don’t have it,” Ginsberg admitted, flushing a dull unhappy red. “It got lost.” They’d gotten evicted. Came home to find all their stuff sitting on the sidewalk, already picked over by anyone who was interested. They had lost a lot, that year.

“You don’t have it,” Sanders said, and yeah. He thought Ginsberg was lying.

“Technically I had two,” Ginsberg said, pressing the heel of his hand against his forehead. “The one from Sweden and the one we got in America. But I don’t - they’re both gone. There could have been a mistake, I guess.”

“A mistake.” Sanders gave him a look. It said: I’m dying to hear this one.

“By whoever wrote it,” he said. “A typo. Or my father. He didn’t speak very good English when we came over. He could have - there might have been some confusion. But a mistake can be fixed. Right?”

“To be clear,” said Sanders, “you’re saying that your father may have put misleading information on your birth certificate.”

Ginsberg looked down at the folded letter, laying so innocently on the desk between them. The spark that had set off a chain of catastrophe. He remembered where he was. And who he was talking to.

“No,” he said. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He could barely get the word out, but he did. No.

“You’ve been telling me a very entertaining story,” said Sanders. “But it is a story. And the United States military does not have time for stories. You need to go report for your medical exam.”

“I’m not ready,” he said, and then, “what if it kills him? My father.” He was thinking of the way Morris had looked, the sudden pallor, the way the angles of his face drooped like fallen powerlines. Like he was dead. “He’s an old man.”

“Everyone thinks it will,” said Sanders. “It never does.”

 

 

The line to the doctor wasn’t long. “How old are you?” he asked, ticking off boxes on his clipboard. “What year were you born?”

“I don’t know,” Ginsberg said, shivering, in his underwear. He closed his eyes. The room dropped away. The waters closed above his head.

(He would have thought he’d fight harder.)

 

 

June closed out in the same sticky heat it usually did. Ginsberg and his father lay like dead fish in the living room, accusing each other of closing the windows. Occasionally Stan came over. Sometimes Ginsberg managed to avoid him. When he didn’t Morris kept looking over at them and then pretending he wasn’t. So Ginsberg took Stan out instead. They went to a bar.

“I thought you didn’t drink much,” said Stan. They were sitting in a booth by the window, because Ginsberg wanted to be able to look outside. The air was blue with smoke and the wallpaper yellowed from long being exposed to the habit. He could at least pretend he was breathing fresh air.

It was like any bar on any street. Creaky red leather seats in the booths. Stools up front that were always populated by the regulars, most of whom were geriatric or getting there. Low lighting and a bowl of peanuts on every table. There were no waitresses, not in a place like this. Ginsberg had gone up and gotten a pitcher of cheap beer.

“I didn’t want to be at home,” said Ginsberg. “Didn’t you see how he was breathing down our necks?”

“Never noticed,” said Stan. “How’s the leg doing? You go to a doctor yet?”

“No,” said Ginsberg. “It’s been better.”

Stan let it go. “You have any plans for tomorrow? Feel like braving the crowds?”

“Crowds?” Ginsberg asked. “Why? What’s special about tomorrow?”

“Have you looked at a calendar since you got back? It’s the fourth.”

Oh. Fireworks and hotdogs. People waving paper flags that would later end up in the garbage. Ginsberg could only just stomach the hyped-up patriotism of that day during a regular year. He’d always spent it at home, sitting on the fire escape and waiting for the sounds of roman candles and catherine wheels to fade so he could go to bed. Now it would be past bearing. I should go get some earplugs, he thought.

“July fourth,” he said, and tipped his glass towards Stan. “Maybe they’ll dye the beer red and blue.”

“I’m taking Peggy to the beach,” Stan said. “Then we’re having a thing, in the evening. You should come.”

“I hate parties.”

“It’s not a party,” said Stan. “It’s a get together. There won’t be many people.”

“There’ll be enough,” said Ginsberg.

“I - okay, man. If you don’t feel like it.” Stan sounded, just for a second, very frustrated. Ginsberg felt bad, but not bad enough to reconsider.

They walked home slowly, Stan adjusting his pace to accommodate Ginsberg’s truncated stride. “Doing anything for work yet?” Stan asked. “Your father refuses to spy for me.”

“There’s this job at the library,” Ginsberg said. “It’s nothing. Shelving books. I was thinking of taking it.” Jesus. From working with million dollar accounts to putting dog-eared paperbacks back on the shelf. Wasn’t pride supposed to go before a fall? If so, he’d learned his lesson a thousand times over.

“Could be a good idea,” said Stan. “Something simple to get you back on your feet.” He never spoke about his job. Maybe he didn’t want to encourage jealousy.

“Better than nothing,” Ginsberg said.

They parted at the front door of Ginsberg’s tenement. Stan walked off whistling, his hands in his pockets. Ginsberg watched him go; the relaxed slope of his shoulders suggested he didn’t have a heavy thought in his head.

His father was waiting. Ginsberg made his way up the stairs alone.

 

 

July fourth bloomed into a beautiful day. People poured into the streets. When he looked down from his window he saw kids turning a hose on each other while their parents sat in folding chairs on the sidewalk. Couples walked along the street holding hands. Someone had lost a cluster of balloons - he watched them float by, disappearing into the sky.

In the evening, while the sun was still up and burning, Morris brought a girl home.

She was about Ginsberg’s age, dressed simply in jeans and a peasant blouse with her sandy brown hair tied back in a ponytail. She looked kind of familiar, but he couldn’t place her. There was a box in her hands, and Morris was carrying one too.

Ginsberg had been making dinner. It wasn’t anything fancy, only a pot roast with potatoes. He’d just taken it out of the oven when they came in.

“Michael, this is Abigail Brickner,” Morris said by way of introduction. “She used to live in this building, remember?”

He didn’t, not quite, but that explained the familiarity. They might have played together as kids. “Hi,” he said, perfunctorily. “My father is making you carry things for him?”

“They’re records,” she said. “My older sister was getting rid of hers - your Dad thought you might want some.”

“Why’d she get rid of them?”

Abigail shrugged. “Moving to some co-op. She’s only allowed to take so much, apparently.”

Ginsberg took the records from her and brought them into the living room. He wasn’t sure if he approved of Morris announcing them as charity cases, but decided to appreciate the gesture. It was different, coming from someone from the neighborhood.

“Thanks,” he said. “And it was nice meeting you. For the second time.”

She looked over at Morris, suddenly unsure. “I kind of thought…”

Morris cleared his throat. “I invited Abigail for dinner,” he said. “Since she carried a box all that way.”

It clicked, then, what Morris was doing. Ginsberg didn’t know why he hadn’t caught on before. He shot his father a glare, cold and genuine anger sparking inside him. This, _again_.

“Nice of you to offer,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Guess it’s lucky I made enough for three.”

 

 

Dinner was brutally uncomfortable. Some of which was his own fault.

“This is really good,” Abigail said, working her way through the roast beef and the heavy silence that had overtaken the room. “Better than I could make.”

“I do okay,” Ginsberg said. “In my opinion, anyway.” He looked across the table at his father, who avoided his eyes.

“Did you teach him, Morris?”

“A little,” Morris said. “But we were without a woman’s touch in our home.”

“Oh,” she said, and directed her next question towards Ginsberg. “So your mother -”

“Is dead,” said Ginsberg, shortly.

“ _Michael_ ,” his father said. But that tone of voice wasn’t gonna work. Not tonight.

“It’s true,” he said, moving potatoes around his plate. “She is.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Abigail, and took a long drink of water. Her eyes flicked back and forth between them. They were dark blue, and she had a spray of freckles across her nose under which her skin was rapidly reddening. “So did Morris tell you I used to be in advertising, too?”

“He didn’t,” said Ginsberg. “Did they fire you, also?”

“You never got fired,” said Morris. “The company folded.”

“Same shit,” Ginsberg said.

“I was a secretary,” she said. “Um, a receptionist. So not exactly in advertising myself. I suppose. I just - uh -” she staggered through the latter part of the sentence, clearly thrown by the vibe in the air, “- I just quit. Found another job.”

“I’m currently unemployed,” said Ginsberg. “Haven’t been able to find a job since I got back.”

“Wow,” said Abigail. “I hope you have better luck soon.”

“So do I,” Ginsberg said. He let his fork fall to his plate, making Morris startle at the sound. “Right,” he said. “Who’s up for dessert?”

 

 

They turned on each other the minute Abigail said goodbye.

It was getting dark, and that meant the fireworks were going to start soon. Ginsberg wasn’t thinking about fireworks. He was thinking about how angry he was, and how tired.

“You did _not_ have to treat that girl like garbage,” Morris snapped, pointing towards the closed door, to the hallway where Abigail was making her rapid escape from the bell jar of their apartment. “I didn’t raise you to talk that way to women!”

“And _you_ didn’t have to bring her here,” Ginsberg shot back, at a considerably higher volume. “You think that girl was gonna want some - some disfigured gimp for a boyfriend? I got no job, no prospects, but you decide you want to match-make. Don’t shake your head, Morris, I know what you were doing. I did her a fucking favor.”

“Maybe I brought her over because I’m sick of not being able to talk to you,” said Morris. “You mope around the house, you disappear without telling me where -”

“- it’s none of your _business_ where -”

“ - where you are going, you’ve shut your whole _life_ down! I don’t know what’s happening to you, Michael. You’re a young man, you should have a young man’s goals. A home of your own. A family.”

“A wife and kids is what you mean,” said Ginsberg, pacing in a circle. “Jesus, you and the wife and kids.”

“What’s wrong with children?” asked Morris. “What’s wrong with a wife?”

Ginsberg exploded. “I’m never going to have one,” he shouted. “And you know _exactly_ why. You’ve always known why.”

His words rang out like a gunshot. In that moment something between them ended. An innocence. Or a mutually agreed upon lie.

“No,” Morris said abruptly, turning away. “No, Michael -”

Ginsberg grabbed at his father’s arm. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, finally, _yes_. If you won’t say it then I will -”

“You’re confused,” Morris said. He was trying to twist away, but Ginsberg wouldn’t let him go. “You’ve had a very hard time.”

“I’m not confused,” said Ginsberg. His voice cracked. “I’m a queer.”

Outside the sky was lighting up in a clamor of celebration. Every pop and thunder-loud crackle seemed to burst inside Ginsberg’s own head, pushing his heart into his throat. He was shaking, and his fingernails left red marks in the palm of his hand.

(- in a fist so tight his knuckles were white his tendons hurt -)

He dropped his father’s arm. Morris had stopped protesting, or trying to leave. There was nothing left for him to say.

 

 

Ginsberg didn’t sleep there that night, or indeed any night after. He waited for his father to go to bed, and then he packed a bag and left.

 

 

 

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...yeah, this is late. I have no excuses. Only apologies.

 

 

 

 

Ginsberg lay in bed, his hands folded across his stomach, and listened to the guy in the next room cry.

The walls were damp gray concrete. It was like living in a prison cell. It smelled exactly like it looked, too, and he was probably picking up some kind of lung rot just by being here. But he wasn’t the one crying so loudly it could be heard through those thick walls, the sound like a tooth gone bad. Low, constant, painful.

He asked himself whether he should go interrupt. He had no answer. It happened every night, and he could never decide. They didn’t know each other, he and the crying man in the next room. Ginsberg had not been able to take stock of his character. They passed each other silently on the way to the bathroom or the kitchen upstairs. He was slight, nondescript, unattractively worn. Not interested in making friends. Just like everyone else staying here. Just like Ginsberg himself.

It was a boardinghouse run by a hard-faced woman who was never out of her bathrobe and never without a bottle. The wallpaper in the kitchen was yellow with cigarette smoke. The dishes sat in the sink for days, buzzing flies circling the way vultures did. He ate elsewhere when he could. A stack of newspapers remained on the back step, delivered but not read. He’d picked through them his first day as a tenant. Some were months old. It didn’t occur to anyone to bring them inside, though somebody had to be paying for the subscription.

Ginsberg’s room was in the basement. There wasn’t much in it. A bed, a dresser with a broken drawer, a standing lamp with a green shade. If he wanted to watch television he had to go up to the living room and fight for control of the remote, but he never did. He could have taken books home from work, but he didn’t do that, either. He went for walks until his leg started bothering him. He kept to himself. And he tried not to think about his father.

He was, in a way, entirely free.

There was no one looking in on him. No one asking where he’d gone, what he was doing, where he planned to go next. No commitments. No connections.

Except for Stan.

Which was his own fault. He’d been the one to call - of course, because how could Stan have reached him? Ginsberg crept out of his own life like a thief in the night. He took only clothing and necessities. He left no trail behind him. An anonymous man in an anonymous house. No footprints and no fingerprints.

(And to think that once upon a time, all he’d wanted was for somebody to notice him.)

But he told Stan. Called him from the hall phone, the big black one with the rotary dial. She made him pay five cents for the privilege.

“We got in a fight,” he said, and no more. “I left home. If you need to talk to me you gotta call me here. I’ll get the message.”

“Are you okay?” Stan asked. He didn’t ask if he was staying with a friend. They both knew Ginsberg didn’t have any. “You got money? Or -”

“I’m fine,” Ginsberg said. “I just… I thought you should know. That you might wanna know.”

Stan insisted they meet. For a drink, he said, at some bar Ginsberg had never heard of. Ginsberg kept changing the date, claiming scheduling issues, but he had pushed that flimsy excuse as far as it could go. Tomorrow was the day. He wasn’t looking forward to it.

He pressed his ear against the wall. The crying neither increased nor retreated. It went on just the same, steady as dripping water. He heaved himself out of bed. The floor under his bare feet was cold and uninviting. It was dirty, too. He curled his toes away from it with a wince and got going.

His neighbor’s door was closed and locked. Ginsberg tapped on it with his knuckles. He braced himself for any reaction he might encounter. “Hey,” he stage-whispered. “Are you alright?”

The door stayed where it was. But the sound stopped.

 

 

The bar was a typical Stan thing, awash in weird purple light and with pillows on the floor you were supposed to sit on in the place of chairs. Stan approached it with a thick layer of irony, but Ginsberg knew he actually loved places like this. He liked playing at being counterculture because he didn’t want to be ordinary. Well, who did.

Ginsberg showed up in an old jean jacket and a baseball cap he’d found in his room. He had it pulled down low; it helped, somehow, when he was out walking. He didn’t want to see anyone, and he sure as fuck didn’t want them seeing him.

“You’re an Orioles fan?” Stan asked, trying to pry the brim up to look into Ginsberg’s face. Ginsberg slapped his hand away.

The beer was about the same as it was everywhere else. There were girls in swirly eyeliner and short skirts all over, lounging across the pillows, smoking and flirting with men. Stan used to go out with that kind of girl. Everyone was hoping to go home with someone. The loneliness could be chased away for one more night.

Or maybe he was projecting.

“What happened?” Stan asked.

“What happened what?”

“Don’t play stupid,” Stan said. “You said you got in a fight. What about?”

“Nothing important,” Ginsberg said. Nothing he was going to tell Stan about. Or anyone, really. How could any of them understand. They might hate him. They might react the same way Morris did. That long, devastating look as the world pivoted on its axis. And the turn away, the shake of the head, a wall slamming up between them. Now he and his father stood on opposite sides of a line and both of them knew it. The cost of his honesty was that they both had to live with the truth.

He wasn’t a bar guy, but he could understand why queers went to them. Just to be able to talk about -

“I should have moved out years ago,” he said, all in a rush, making sure he got the right words out before other, more dangerous thoughts overtook him. “You know it and I know it so what are we even talking about, here? I got a job. I’m not dependent on him.”

“Never said you were.” Stan picked his glass up but didn’t drink. It left a ring on the coaster. “But humans have a natural tendency towards inertia, Ginzo. A fight has to be pretty bad before you’ll leave home over it.” He shrugged. “I ought to know. The same thing happened to me.”

“Your Dad?” Stan’s mother wasn’t in the picture because his parents had gotten a divorce. That much Ginsberg knew, though Stan didn’t talk about them a lot in general.

Stan nodded. “He called me a pansy.”

Ginsberg startled enough that he almost spilled his drink. “What? _You_?”

Stan laughed. “Yeah, can you believe that shit? All because I wanted to be an artist.” He shook his head. “Who says something like that to their kid? We got over it eventually, but not as quick as he would have liked. I slept on couches for awhile. I had friends in the city - Portland, not here.”

“Nobody thinks they’re going to hurt their kids,” said Ginsberg. “Everyone does. What kind of world is that?”

“It’s the one we’ve got,” Stan said, apparently unbothered. “So where are you staying?”

“Some rent-a-room,” Ginsberg said. “Does it matter?”

“Yes, it matters.” Stan’s tone was crisp enough to verge on being pissed off. “It matters when you run away from home. And it matters why you did it. Why won’t you tell me?”

“Because it’s none of your business,” said Ginsberg. “I’m not running away. Am I thirteen years old?”

“Are you?” Stan asked. “Maybe. I don’t know. Sometimes you act like you are.”

Ginsberg’s hands curled into fists. There was nowhere to put them but his lap, grasping the hem of his over-sized sweatshirt. He hunched his shoulders, glancing sideways to make sure they weren’t being observed. He did that a lot. Wondered if anyone was listening.

“What does _that_ mean?” He hated how petulant he sounded. Like the little boy Stan apparently thought he was.

“Nothing, Ginsberg,” Stan said. He looked tired. That made two of them. “I didn’t come here to fight with you. I have an offer to make.”

“What?” Ginsberg asked, slowly. He didn’t want to hear anything he was going to have to say no to. “Like a job? I can’t go back to advertising.”

“Not a job,” Stan said. “A place to live.”

“You’re moving in with Peggy,” Ginsberg said. “I can’t sublet your apartment, either.”

“It’s _with_ Peggy,” Stan said. “She has an extra bedroom. Her new place is bigger. It’s yours if you want it.”

There was very little that Stan could have said that would have been more of a surprise. Ginsberg reared back, staring for a long minute. It did not appear to be a joke. And then he laughed. Loudly.

“You have gotta be kidding me,” he said. “Are you crazy?”

Now Stan _was_ pissed off. There was no question of it. He slammed his glass down hard enough that he attracted the attention Ginsberg was trying to avoid. “What’s crazy about that? You can have a room rent free. She doesn’t even want anything for it. It would be crazy to say no.”

“Then call the men in white coats,” Ginsberg said. “‘Cause that’s what I’m saying. Peggy and I don’t get along, Stan. We aren’t _friends_.”

Stan leaned forward, his jaw set. He held up a finger. “I’m going to give you some advice. When a friend is trying to help you, don’t go out of your way to insult his fucking girlfriend.”

“Are we friends?” asked Ginsberg. “Did I _ask_ for confession hour? Are we supposed to be comparing childhood traumas? Talking about our crushes? Want to braid my hair, too?”

It was as low a blow as he could have chosen. And it landed. Stan jumped to his feet, clawing at his back pocket for his wallet. He threw a couple of bills on the table. His face had gotten very red. “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

“News at eleven.”

“I have never met anyone so determined to be miserable,” Stan said. “I know you don’t want to hear it but I feel sorry for you. I really do.”

So it was pity, then. He might have guessed.

“How generous of you,” Ginsberg said. “Go feel bad for me somewhere else.”

Any satisfaction he might have gained from getting the last word faded immediately. It had been a sick and empty pleasure in the first place, as calorie free as that Miracle Whip shit they used to shill . But the absence left him hollow. There was only a dull pain in his chest and a stinging in his eyes and the sensation of sinking further down. The water was closing over his head. And he, screaming in useless rage, had decided to pull the only life preserver he had in after him.

 

 

After that came a string of long, undifferentiated days like a yellow line going down the road. He went to the library and shelved books. They gave him a paycheck, which he used to buy groceries that other people kept eating and to go to movies he forgot five minutes after seeing them. New York rocketed into summer, the humidity climbing until the air took on the consistency of pea soup. Walking from the train to the house left him soaked like he’d run a marathon. Every July he wondered why he didn’t move north. Montreal, maybe. Didn’t they have a big Jewish community? He showered twice a day and kept the window in his room wide open. The smell of hot garbage permeated everything.

Stan called, once. He didn’t take it. Why pull Stan back into any of this. He had a girlfriend, a great job, a life. Best to leave it alone, and if their relationship wasn’t gonna last forever then neither did anything else.

He sat in laundromats watching his clothes turn in the dryer, but never with his back to the door. His floor was littered with crossword puzzles he couldn’t finish; every time he tried to remember a word it slipped away from him. On an aimless Saturday he saw the Cosgroves on the street, pushing a baby carriage containing an apple-cheeked infant. He hid from them, ducking behind a streetlight. The twilight of his twenties was fading to dark and he had done nothing, been nothing, _was_ nothing.

And it was in this mood, at this time, that Stan stopped by and they got into a fucking slapfight.

It was the most pathetic thing that could be imagined. Ginsberg had walked home from the grocery store with his bad leg twinging the whole way. He had cans and boxes and nothing fresh or in need of refrigeration, because all of it was going under his bed. He was tired of his food getting stolen. He was also hoping he could avoid scurvy but it was going to be touch and go.

He had experienced, briefly, a flash of memory while grocery shopping. Something from the orphanage so lost to the mists of time it was difficult to tell what it was. Hiding a bowl under the bed, or a treat of some kind, and getting caught later because it started to smell.

Stan was waiting for him. Not even in a place where he could have reasonably been told to go away, but in his bedroom. Sitting on his bed and looking overheated and irritated.

“Amazing,” he said. “You’re alive after all.”

“She let you in?” Ginsberg asked. “What did you do, bribe her?”

“Sweet-talked her a little,” Stan said. “Don’t you want to know how I found you?”

Ginsberg set the bag on the edge of the dresser. All the furniture had come with the room. Someone had carved a line from _Howl_ on the side of it. _Trembling before the machinery of other skeletons_ , it said. “Sounds like you want to be asked.”

“I followed you,” he said. “And you never noticed, because you walk around looking at the ground. I’d have thought a guy as paranoid as you would be more careful.”

Ginsberg put his hands in his pockets. A spider crawled out of a crack in the wall, close to the headboard. Sometimes at night he thought he heard mice moving through the dark. But it could have been his imagination. “Why are you here, Stan?”

“Because I don’t understand what’s going on with you,” said Stan. “I don’t know why -” He twisted around to take stock of his surroundings. The scarred wood of the dresser and limp curtains. The water stains on the walls, the single window with bars on it. Not up to the fire code, that one. Ginsberg used to worry about that kind of thing. The accumulated dust and cobwebs in the corners from long years of indifference.“Would you really rather live like this? Is this what you _want_?”

Ginsberg shrugged. It was what he deserved, but he wasn’t going to say that to Stan. Instead he cut across the room to yank the curtains shut, blocking out the sunlight that had been leaking in. “You need to leave,” he said.

“Yeah, big shot?” Stan asked. “Then make me.”

“Are you _serious_?” Ginsberg hissed. He could feel his face warming up, and he was already pink from the heat. “Get off my goddamned bed!”

“I’m not leaving until I get some answers from you,” Stan retorted. “What happened with your father?”

“Fuck you,” Ginsberg said. He wanted it to be cold and devastating, but it came out panicked, strained. His breath was coming fast. Why that question? Why did Stan _care_? “I’m not giving you shit. I don’t owe you anything.”

“Right,” said Stan. “Because we aren’t friends.” He stood up. Ginsberg was reminded of how much heavier his build was, especially now. “I really almost forgot.”

“You need a reminder?” Ginsberg asked, as nasty as he could.

“You think if you keep doing that I’m gonna go somewhere?” Stan asked. “You think you’re fooling me? You used to be smarter than this, Ginz.”

“I - I don’t -” Ginsberg’s hands seemed to move of their own accord, reaching up to grab the brim of his hat. He had not, somehow, expected to be caught. He needed time to think. “Don’t,” he said. “Just don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Stan asked. “Act like I care about you?”

“No,” said Ginsberg, sharply. He ducked away, pressing himself into the corner of the room like a frightened animal. “No, I don’t want to hear this. I don’t - I don’t care about you. Okay? I don’t. So just go the fuck away.” He stuttered over the words, tripping over them. The lie felt slimy in his mouth.

Stan paused. Ginsberg refused to meet his eyes.

“Bullshit,” he said. “Look me in the face and say that.”

“I am.”

“You’re a shitty liar, Ginsberg,” Stan said. He reached out and pulled Ginsberg’s cap off his head in one sudden motion. “And give me that fucking thing, did you go bald in Vietnam too?”

Ginsberg felt suddenly exposed, like he had walked out of the shower to find a stranger sitting in his room. “Give it back,” he snapped, grabbing at Stan’s hands. Stan’s grip only went tighter, the cap balled up in his palm and his knuckles popping out.

“No,” he said.

And Ginsberg got so _mad_ \- so fucking pissed off, blindly so, that he did something really stupid. He shoved Stan, knocking him back against the bed.

“What the _fuck_?” Stan dropped the hat. He also grabbed the front of Ginsberg’s shirt, yanking him forward. “Knock it off! What the hell is _wrong_ with you?”

Ginsberg did it again. They struggled across the room, Ginsberg trying to get away and Stan refusing to let go. He wanted Stan to fight back, to actually hit him, to fucking _end_ this. But he wouldn’t. Of course he wouldn’t.

And then Ginsberg’s leg went out from under him.

It happened very quickly; a bright spasm of pain that made him shout and then he was on the floor, dragging Stan with him.

“Jesus Christ, Jesus - are you _okay_? Ginsberg, are you -”

“ _Get off me_ ,” Ginsberg howled, and Stan finally did. He sat with his back against the mattress, his mouth stiff with concern.

“Did I hurt you?” he asked.

Ginsberg was clutching at his leg. He pressed his fingers into his calf, feeling scar tissue and balled-up muscles under his hands. He didn’t know if he was making it better or worse. His groceries had fallen to the floor during the struggle, cans rolling under the bed. And he didn’t answer Stan’s question.

“I left home because my father found out I’m a fucking homo, okay?” he said. “Is that a good enough answer for you? Are you happy, now?”

Stan blinked. He seemed to re-orient himself, not as shocked as Ginsberg might have expected. “Morris threw you out?”

“Not exactly,” said Ginsberg. “But he didn’t want me there. So I left.”

Stan groped for a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. He took one out and put it in his mouth, unlit. “Then fuck him,” he declared.

Ginsberg swallowed. There was a sudden lump in his throat. He hadn’t been expecting -

“What?” Stan said. “Did you think I wouldn’t be on your side?”

“You said things, sometimes,” Ginsberg said. “About guys like me.”

Stan sighed. “I run my mouth off, Ginsberg. There’s no use in taking anything I say seriously. And I’m just a prick, okay? I didn’t mean it.” He went quiet for a second. “Peggy says I’m insecure,” he volunteered.

“Did you know?” Ginsberg asked. He’d been trying so hard to hide it - but he wasn’t good at pretending. Had never been.

“I wondered,” Stan said. “You never had any girlfriends.”

“I like girls,” Ginsberg said. “I don’t _only_ like girls.”

“Okay,” Stan said. “So you’re just - what? Shy?”

Ginsberg gave him a truly incredulous look and Stan laughed.

“None of my business,” he said. “I get it.” He found a lighter and lit up. “So,” he asked, exhaling smoke. “You still want to stay here, instead of with Peggy?”

“Why would Peggy let me live with her?” he asked. “After what I said about her? She isn’t an idiot.”

“I didn’t tell her,” said Stan. “I’m not an idiot, either.”

“Why do you want to help me?” he asked. “You or her? I’m - I’ve been so fucking _hateful_ -”

“Ginsberg,” Stan said, and then said it again. “Hey. _Hey_. Are you crying?”

“No,” Ginsberg said, but he couldn’t stop his face from crumpling. God, he was so pathetic.

“Come here,” Stan said, and when Ginsberg didn’t, he dragged him over physically and threw an arm over his shoulders. “You’ve had one hell of a year, buddy. All I’m asking is that you let me try and make it a little easier.”

“I’ll think about it,” Ginsberg said. Stan smelled a little like sweat and a lot like the cologne Peggy had given him for his birthday, and he wished he hadn’t noticed that. “Can I have a few days?”

“You can have as long as you want,” Stan said. He squeezed Ginsberg’s shoulder, who closed his eyes and wished he could stay exactly where he was, just for a few more minutes. But there were limits, even for the most supportive friends. He edged away and got to his feet.

“A couple of days,” he said. “And I’ll know for sure.”

 

 

The library was, of course, very quiet. Even more so in the morning, before kids came in for reading hour. Their harried mothers would park them in front of the librarian and escape for a cigarette, a minute of gossip or a cup of coffee down the street. The kids spent the morning listening to _Harold and the Purple Crayon_ or _The Borrowers_. Then they got set loose to choose their own books, and there was always a lot of re-shelving to do after they left.

He dealt a lot with college or high school kids, too, but they came in late afternoon. They wanted him to help find this or that, apparently not realizing he wasn’t a librarian. Sometimes he read the reference books they left behind, thick tomes about Chaucer or New Guinea or Microcellular Degeneration. He turned thick pages illustrated with foreign photographs or diagrams and filled with words he didn’t recognize. And then he would put them away, a fragment smarter, maybe.

It was on a still, cloudless morning that his father showed up. In a way, he’d been expecting exactly that. Morris never did know how to leave him alone.

Ginsberg was pushing his cart along, loaded down with returns from the previous night. Morris looked dressed for work, which he should already have been at. He sat at a table with his hat off and nothing to read in front of him.

“Stan told you,” Ginsberg said.

“Stan didn’t tell me nothing,” Morris said. “You think I talk to him now that you’re gone?”

“Then how’d you know I was here?”

“Michael,” his father said. “You work in the neighborhood. People talk. It wasn’t rocket science.” He nodded at the chair across from him. “Sit.”

“I could have you thrown out,” Ginsberg said.

“Are you gonna?”

He sighed. “No,” he admitted, and sat down. “But you have ten minutes to say your piece. Got it?”

Morris raised his eyebrows at that, but he didn’t protest. “I don’t need ten,” he said. “I want you to come home.”

Ginsberg pressed his lips together, and then he shook his head. “Nope.”

“Why the hell not?” Morris asked. “Why would - what’re you doing, here? Is this a punishment?” He leaned in, his fingers spread against the surface of the table. “Michael,” he said again, “I didn’t tell anyone about - what you said, that night. You hear me? It’s still safe, at home. Nobody has to know.”

Ginsberg rubbed a hand over his face. “Christ. That’s it, right there. That is why I’m not coming back.”

“I don’t understand,” Morris said, and looking at him Ginsberg could see that he really didn’t. He could also see how genuinely hurt he was. But those feelings weren’t his responsibility. Not any longer.

Didn’t most people who tried to save someone from drowning die themselves?

“Look,” he said. “I know it was a certain way, for men of your time. But you gotta understand - Pop, I’m not like that, okay? I’m not going to spend my life pretending to be someone I’m not. Maybe before Vietnam I would have. But not now. Can you handle that?”

Morris held his hands out, palms facing up. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never had to think about it before.”

“You must have,” Ginsberg said. “You knew. Don’t pretend you didn’t.”

“I hoped your life would be easier,” said Morris. “You should have a good life. Comfort. A real home. One where you get to have the same things other people do.”

“My life hasn’t been easy since the day I was fucking born,” Ginsberg snapped. “And you of all people should know better. And if me being - what I _am_ \- makes my life harder than it would otherwise be - fuck, I’m not the one who’s responsible for that. I’m not the one who decided that a wife and two-point-five kinds was the only way to go.”

“It can be a lonely life,” Morris said. “I hope you’re prepared for that.”

“I’m already lonely,” Ginsberg said. “I always was.”

“And you’d be willing to risk everything you worked so hard for -”

“It’s gone,” Ginsberg interrupted. “It’s never coming back. I have nothing left to lose.”

“Oh, my boy,” Morris said, low and mournful. “There’s always something left to lose. I hope you never know how much. And I wish you were more careful.”

“Being careful doesn’t keep you safe,” Ginsberg said.

Morris nodded. He appeared to have run out of protestations. Because he knew his son was right. They both did, in the most hideous and irreversible way. “So you won’t come back.”

“No,” Ginsberg said.

“Can I come see you?” Morris asked. “Here - or, wherever you are.”

Ginsberg looked over in shock. He couldn’t recall his father ever asking his permission before. Not so blatantly.

“If you want,” he said. “A reasonable amount. Don’t show up all the time.”

“I won’t,” he said, standing up. And then, because he was still Morris: “You could call, you know. It won’t kill you to pick up a phone.”

Ginsberg tried to fight off a smile and did not quite succeed. “Don’t push your luck,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah.” His father put his hat back on and stood, waiting, with his shoulders hunched. Like he had more to say, or was waiting for Ginsberg to; like he wanted a hug. A proper goodbye. But what could Ginsberg give that he hadn’t already given? If he was providing the sticks then it was still Morris who had to build the bridge.

“Hey,” he said, all the same. “Take care.”

“You as well,” Morris said. “Promise me.”

“I always do.”

“You never do.” There was a hand, briefly, in his hair - and then Morris was gone. The hush of the library seemed heavier than usual, until the doors were thrown open and children tumbled through. Laughing, chasing each other across the floor. Hand-in-hand with a mother or a babysitter; knowing that nothing could ever go wrong, as long as they kept holding on.

 

 

 

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry again for the long delay! Fingers crossed that I can move to a more regular posting schedule.

 

 

 

Ginsberg stood in the elevator of Peggy’s building, sweating. He had his suitcase in his hand, an unused subway token in his back pocket and a wince on his face. He would have to smooth that out, before he met with Peggy. It was because of his leg, but not only his leg. He was nervous. His palms were clammy and he hoped she wouldn’t try to shake his hand.

The hallway was long and filled with corners. It was a big building. As he trod the blue carpet, scanning the numbers on doors, he remembered another time he had arrived at a new home with only one suitcase to his name and he tried not to draw parallels between that and this.

He found Peggy’s door: number 616, the first digit indicating that he was on the sixth floor of the building, not that there were six hundred apartments in the place though that was what it felt like. The numerals were gold colored and looked polished. Back home — no, at his _father’s_ — the numbers on their door had been worn and tinny and were always falling off.

He knocked. Peggy answered immediately, the way she would have if it came at three in the morning. “Hi,” she said, slightly out of breath though she couldn’t have been standing very far away.

Ginsberg coughed. He made a sound in his throat, trying to clear it. “I,” he said, and then started again. “I just wanna say thanks. And that I’ll try and get out of your hair as soon as possible.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I mean, nobody else needs the room. Except the cat, maybe.” She tried to smile, and mostly succeeded.

It was a strange, stilted exchange, as awkward on her end as it was on his. It occurred to him that he and Peggy had never spent any social time together, never interacted outside the bell jar of the office. It also occurred to him that it wasn’t too late to turn back. He pictured himself fleeing down the hallway, one arm and the attached suitcase flying behind him like an old Fleischer cartoon.

“Why don’t you come in?” she asked, and the window for escape closed.

She had to remind him to take off the coat he had worn purely to avoid packing it, and had to turn him around and point him in the direction of the closet. His shoes he left in front of the door, and the suitcase he carried with him.

Peggy’s place wasn’t one of those hyper-modern jobs, covered in op-art and confusing rounded furniture. It had probably been built at some time in the forties in a vaguely Frank Lloyd Wright style: large windows, cream-colored walls with dark wooden accents, a fireplace made of white-painted brick that would almost pass for real stone. The carpet was newer, and very soft. A large ceiling fan turned lazily over his head. There was a balcony on which he could see a couple of struggling plants and also the orange body of her cat, sprawled in a pool of sunshine. The screen door was open and the sounds of a New York summer day readily apparent.

“Nice digs,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m still kind of decorating, but it looks okay so far.” She shrugged. “I never thought a ton about how my apartment looked before. It’s different when you’re renting, right?”

“Furniture is furniture,” he said. “As long as it doesn’t have something living in it.”

“Yeah,” she said, with a weak laugh, which was fair because his joke wasn’t very funny. He had a hard time being funny, recently. “I could use a decorator, but that just seems impersonal. And overpriced, frankly.”

He wondered if she had a maid come in. He kind of hoped not; the whole idea of having another person cleaning the space he was living in was too weird. If there was, should he talk to her? Offer her a coffee or something?

Peggy’s couch was obviously well loved, chosen more for comfort than looks. He recalled all the times he or Stan had shown up at the office to find her asleep on the sofa in the creative lounge. Stan had always gotten this soft, affectionate look on his face, right before he woke her up in the most ridiculous way possible. The coffee table was strewn with magazines, some with pages ripped out or written on. Research. And there was a Belle Jolie ad framed on the wall. It must have been one of Peggy’s.

He had a sense of relief that the apartment wasn’t a magazine spread, a declaration of showy wealth and taste. He had gone to Don’s exactly once to deliver some work and had been terrified the whole time of getting something on the carpet, as though the Lower East Side was sticking to his shoes. Every of inch of the room had screamed: you don’t belong here. It was amazing how men like that could make a guy feel like shit without ever opening their mouths.

“Your bedroom is right here,” Peggy said, and led him in.

It was a typical guest bedroom, laid out plainly and practically. There was a fairly large closet, a dresser with a vase that had silk flowers in it, and a double bed with a plaid green bedspread folded at the foot of the mattress. The sheets looked unused. The only decoration on the walls were two small landscapes: mallard ducks in a pond and a field at sunset. They were prints, not paintings.

“Feel free to put up any family pictures you want,” she said. “Did you bring anything with you?”

“No,” he said, and she avoided his gaze.

“Books?” she asked, indicating the one under his arm. “We can get a bookshelf easy enough.”

“Just from the library,” he explained. “It’s fine. I don’t need much space. Like I said, I won’t be here long.”

“You don’t have to rush,” she told him, “like _I_ said. Stan seemed to think you’d be here awhile.”

“Stan is an optimist.”

“He’s something,” she said, with a fine and private smile. He felt like ought to have not seen it at all, and to cover his embarrassment he sat down on the bed.

“It’s great, Peggy,” he said. “I’m just gonna unpack.”

“You want anything to eat? There’s casserole in the fridge.”

He declined. If he could have he would have made a crack about being on a diet but he knew it would go over like a lead balloon. Stan was always bugging him to eat, and Peggy surely must have noticed the same change in him. And he tried. He just had no appetite. He was too tired, too anxious, too something.

Maybe he should start smoking pot. That gave people the munchies, right?

“I’ll let you get to it,” Peggy said, and backed out of the room. She was as aware of the skewed dynamic between them as Ginsberg was. He pitied her. They had never been friends and he had come back from the war greatly altered; if he was a stranger to himself, how could he not be a stranger to her? He put his head in his hands after she was gone, trying to stop the spinning.

 

 

The next morning was a bright and beautiful one. He regarded it resentfully. He had the day off, and he never knew what to do with his days off. In his old life he had loved them; a Saturday at the park or at the movies, no deadlines looming, no Don Draper breathing down his neck. And if he worked on his projects a little in the wee hours that was fine: he did his best thinking at three in the morning. There was no _pressure_ , the way there was at the office. Nobody making a racket in the lounge and distracting him or freelancers asking stupid questions. Only his father, turning the kitchen light on in search of a glass of water and telling him to go the hell to bed.

He had never been out of things to do, back then. Now, in the post-dawn warmth of Peggy’s guest bedroom, he could feel the hours filling up with nothingness. His heart started to speed up, so he closed his eyes and tried to count backwards from ten or whatever it was you were supposed to do. Or was that breathing into a paper bag?

There were noises coming from the kitchen. He heard a man’s voice — Stan, naturally. Ginsberg wrinkled his nose at the smell of bacon frying. He may not have been going to  _shul_ much anymore, but he never could get past his aversion to pork. It just wasn’t food.

He stretched out a leg and jumped when he encountered something warm and heavy. It was the cat, lying on his side and flicking his tail back and forth. Did that mean he wanted to play or fight?

Ginsberg decided not to risk incurring Agent Orange’s wrath. He got up slowly, inching out from under the blankets. The cat didn’t move. He rolled over instead, yawning so big that his head went all flat.

The bathroom was down the hall from the bedrooms. He tried to get there before Stan or Peggy noticed him. No dice.

“Stan made eggs,” Peggy called out. “Not only bacon.” Which was very thoughtful of her, really. So he had to acknowledge her or feel guilty.

He was in his shorts and an undershirt — what he always slept in, especially in the summer — and wished he had a bathrobe. But he didn’t bring one with him and it wasn’t like he could ask to borrow Stan’s. So he sat across the table from them and picked at his eggs, cognizant of his morning breath and his messy hair and his five o’clock shadow that just kept getting worse. He was having trouble shaving without nicking his face; it was his lost fingers, or the shaking, or one of a million other reasons. There will be a period of adjustment, the doctor had said. He could have gone to a barber, but the idea of a straight razor made him shudder. So he avoided it until he couldn’t stand himself anymore.

(Even the sight of such a small amount of blood made him sick.)

“I didn’t know you cooked,” he said to Stan.

“I’m Italian,” Stan said. “And it’s a fried egg, Ginzo. Anyone can do that.”

“He’s better at it than I am,” Peggy said.

“I can cook a little,” Ginsberg said. “Not much.” The coffee was black with sugar, the way he always drank it. Peggy had handed him a mug when he came in. She remembered his order, which he wouldn’t have expected.

She was also more relaxed in Stan’s presence. Ginsberg wished he could say the same. Instead he was hyper-aware of how far this was from normal. The problem was that it was an echo of all the times they had eaten together just like this, out of cartons or with chopsticks, cramming in a meal before a meeting or during overtime. Now he had trouble holding his fork steady; now he had trouble looking either of them in the eye. He was an invader in their space.

They were both dressed for work. Or Stan was as dressed for work as he ever got, anyway.

“Do you drive in together?” he asked. Peggy used to take the subway. Stan, though, had a car. He liked to drive outside the city on weekends and sketch the birds. Anything but a pigeon, he’d said.

“Sure,” said Stan. “Why wouldn’t we?”

“Right,” Ginsberg said. “That makes sense. Don’t know why I asked.”

“Do you have any plans?” Peggy asked. She had reapplied her lipstick, and was now blotting at it with a paper napkin.

“No shift today,” he said. “Guess I might go for a walk.”

“Be careful not overstrain your leg,” Stan said. “You’re on it too much already.”

Ginsberg didn’t know how to respond to that. Concern made him uncomfortable. And maybe it always had; he had a thousand memories of flinching back from his father’s hugs or snapping at him over an innocuous question.

“Um,” he said. “Peggy?”

“Yes?”

“Can I use your bathroom?”

She stared at him. “You live here,” she said. “You don’t have to ask.”

His face prickled with his own stupidity. “Right,” he said, and left the room as fast as he could go.

 

 

Stan and Peggy went to work. Ginsberg went to a bar.

He fed the cat first, rummaging through the cupboards until he found cans with cartoon felines on the labels. Peggy had forgotten. The cat sniffed at the bowl and then walked away in a display of stunning ingratitude.

Left at loose ends, he went for a stroll around the block. He could have stayed in and watched television but it would have been strange, sitting on Peggy’s sofa or flipping through her magazines while she wasn’t there. As if he needed permission to do those things. A psychological hall pass. Besides, he had a tingling in his bones that needed to be dispersed. A terrible energy that welled up in him when he had no task to focus on; it was like ants under his skin, making him want to run, to scream, to get it out any way he could. His nerves or his heart or his brain were to blame and he couldn’t tell which. So he walked, his leg not as bad as it could have been, until he came across a local watering hole so nondescript that it might have been in any neighborhood or any city. It was perfect.

By the very nature of its existence a daytime bar was anonymous. Only the career drinkers would be there or the eternally heartbroken. There might be a lunch rush, but he could be gone before it happened. He could sit in the back, a table to himself, and nurse a beer until the energy compelled him to move again.

He was trying to stay off his leg. In some undefinable way he had made a promise to Stan when he agreed to move in with Peggy, one that meant he had to take better care of himself. But it was hard. All the old mechanisms were still there. He had _never_ been good at taking care of himself. Morris had been right to worry.

The bar had wood panelled walls and pictures of baseball players on the walls, smiling with bats set against their athletic shoulders. Somebody was a Mets fan. All except the wall behind the bar, which was green wallpaper backing framed photographs of bartenders new and old. Some of them looked positively ancient, like one guy with a Victorian mustache that curled up at the ends. Yet it was all the same bar: different staff, different glasses and bottles, but the same smooth oak surface with stained-glass insets.

“How long has this place been here?” he asked.

The bartender shrugged. “A hundred years, give or take.”

“Wow,” said Ginsberg. He noticed a sign behind him — Beware of Pickpockets and Loose Women. It appeared to be a real warning of some kind, though one from another age. “Was that a big concern?” he asked.

“Still is,” said the bartender. “What can I get you?”

He got his beer and went to find a booth. They all had glass lamps hanging above them, yellow with grapevines along the edges. The beer was a touch warm but he wasn’t that concerned with drinking it. It was more to give him a place to put his hands — wrapped around the glass — and a reason for being there.

There were a couple of old men at the bar, both in threadbare fedoras of the kind that nobody was wearing anymore and checkered blazers in spite of the heat. They looked like bookends, and were likely brothers, but something about the way they engaged with each other reminded him of Morris and his friend Izzy. It was a perpetual, low-stakes, humourous argument, one that would only spring up between people who had known each other for years. Ginsberg tried to hear what they were saying but wasn’t close enough.

Half the beer was gone and he was considering leaving when he looked up to see Bob Benson walk into the bar.

There had been so many changes to New York since Ginsberg had first gone away, but Bob was exactly the same. The same boyish face, the same neat and tidy haircut. Still in a suit jacket and khakis.

He wasn’t supposed to be here. Last Ginsberg had heard — and it hadn’t been that long ago — he had been in Detroit, working with the car guys. It must have been a perfect position for him, all that unnatural smoothness put to good use. He could be the reasonable face of the company while the rest of them trawled brothels and shot ad execs. Or maybe he was the one dealing with the advertisers. Bob had told him once that he liked creative people but lacked abilities in that direction himself. If he was the representative sent out to McCann or Ogilvy or Leo Burnett then he would finally be the one pulling the strings, the only veto vote that mattered. He would probably like that. Bob made himself indispensable; Bob never stopped smiling. Bob had been very good at hiding his ambition, but Ginsberg had always known it was there.

Ginsberg didn’t want to be noticed by him, and he wasn’t. Bob sat down by the window in front and was clearly trying not to look out of it compulsively; he checked his watch frequently. After about forty minutes he got up and left. Whomever he had been waiting for never showed. Ginsberg ducked down slightly when Bob’s head turned in his direction but again he wasn’t seen.

The most probable scenario was a ditched business meeting, and it wasn’t any of his concern in the first place. Still, it was all very mysterious. Ginsberg watched him leave, and he wondered.

 

 

That night, when he couldn’t sleep, Ginsberg snuck out into the living room and turned the television on. He made sure the volume was low enough not to wake Peggy. His only company was the cat, who approached him delicately, sniffing his outstretched fingers. He rubbed his furry little face against them and just like that they were friends. The cat climbed into his lap and accepted ear scratches like they were his due.

Peggy’s bedroom door opened and she came out, wearing a blue nightgown and with her hair in curlers. “Oh,” she said when she saw him, like she’d forgotten he lived there.

“Sorry,” Ginsberg said. He pointed to the cat. “We’re visiting. What’s his name? I didn’t ask before.”

“Butterscotch,” she said. “It was what the pound named him.”

“He was a stray?”

“At some point,” she said. “But he was kind of fat so I think somebody was feeding him.”

“A good samaritan,” said Ginsberg. “Stan didn’t stay over tonight?”

Peggy shrugged. “He doesn’t always. He has his own place.” There was a defensive set to her mouth, so Ginsberg let it drop. “Why are you up?”

“I have trouble with getting to sleep,” he said. “I get — I don’t know. My brain goes into overdrive. And there’s no point in laying bed for hours.”

“I can get like that,” she said. “I guess I —”

“Yeah?”

“Sleep better when Stan is here.” He could see an immediate regret go through her at having told him. Ginsberg knew about the things people said in the dark and lonely hours. How quickly defenses could drop, creating an involuntary and embarrassing spasm of feeling. So he tried to be kind and pretended that he didn’t. He stroked the cat’s arching back, acted casual.

“Anyway,” she said, recovering. “Feel free to have some warm milk.”

“Sounds great. I’ll be quiet, either way.”

“Goodnight, Michael,” she said. For a minute it seemed like there was would be more; her eyes flicked towards him, her lips parted. He waited but nothing came. She went back into her room and closed the door between them.

 

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

 

 

 

Stan poured Ginsberg another glass of wine. He’d gotten it from work — not Manischewitz, but some Italian brand that wanted to expand stateside and had landed at McCann. Earlier Stan had taught him how to make parmigiana. “You’d better learn,” he said, “since you’re living with her.” Peggy made a very rude gesture from the couch where she was teasing the cat with a feather.

“Did your Mom teach you?” Ginsberg asked. Stan had said something about his father being career military and Ginsberg had always pictured some bullet-headed man with a crewcut, the type to always have a sunburn on the back of his neck. Probably not someone who fired the oven up a whole lot.

“Nope,” Stan said. “My grandmother did.”

“You spend a lot of time with her?”

“Lived with her when I was about thirteen,” he said, taking the pan out of the oven. “Right after my parents split up.”

“Couldn’t have been easy,” Ginsberg said. Stan looked at him. “Teaching a thirteen year old boy how to cook, I mean.”

Stan smiled. “I was a little wild,” he admitted. “But she was a tough old lady.” He dropped the dishtowel he’d been using to take the pan out on the counter. “What were you like at that age? Exactly the same, I’d bet.”

“You would’ve been stuffing me into lockers.”

The regretful downturn of Stan’s mouth surprised him. “I might have,” he admitted, and appeared relieved when Peggy came over and changed the subject.

Now Ginsberg was — he was a little drunk. More than a little. He had apparently misjudged the alcoholic content of wine. Hard liquor let a person know it was dangerous. It went down like a pack of matches. But wine looked like juice and tasted like salt. And Stan kept refilling his glass.

Not, he thought, on purpose. Stan wasn’t trying to get him drunk, he wasn’t going to laugh at him if he said something stupid. It occurred to him how rare a condition that had been in his life, a guarantee that he wouldn’t be laughed at. Not that he had a fear of it. People laughing at him had been too common for him to be afraid of it.

“What?” Peggy asked. She was trying to light a cigarette and looking at him in a direct and curious way.

“I’m not doing anything,” he said.

“You were lost in thought,” she said. “I was wondering why.” She had her hand on Stan’s thigh. Peggy, when drinking, forgot her social inhibitions very quickly.

“It was —” he said, and paused. “I forgot.”

They laughed and to his surprise so did he. It was like a wave lifted him up briefly to where he used to be. It hadn’t occurred to him that it had been a long time since he found anything funny, really funny, without a shard of glass in it somewhere.

“I’m having _such_ a good time,” he said.

Stan laughed again, his broad shoulders shaking. He wiped at his eyes. “Jesus,” he said. “I let you have too much.”

“You didn’t _let_ me,” Ginsberg said. “I’m not a child, Stan.”

“Okay, sport. You’re just a lightweight.”

Peggy’s cigarette bobbed in her mouth. She couldn’t make the flame connect, so Ginsberg reached over and took the lighter from her. “I’ve got half a hand and I could do that better than you.”

Peggy wrinkled her nose. “That’s a gross thing to say, Michael.”

“It’s my hand,” he said. “I can say whatever I want about it.” He fumbled the lighter at the end of the sentence and it bounced against the table top. Stan covered it with his hand before either of them could retrieve it.

“You know what?” he said. “How about we don’t play with fire when we’re drunk.”

“You used to let me throw knives at you when you were drunk,” Ginsberg pointed out.

Stan gave him an acidic look. “I was high, not drunk,” he said. “And it hurt the next day so I regretted that decision, thanks.”

“Stan kissed me that night,” Peggy said, all of a sudden. “When I was bandaging him up.” She dropped her unused cigarette into a nearly emptied glass of wine. “Do you remember, I wonder? Everything was so crazy.”

“Of course I remember,” he said. “How could I forget?”

Peggy smiled and her fingers flexed on his thigh. “I thought so,” she said.

Living with a couple could be like this, it seemed. Ginsberg was a spectator to a kind of intimacy he could only imagine, and barely that. Like watching an alien mating ritual.

He looked down at his hands. The tremor was fairly tamed, smoothed over by alcohol or simple relaxation. The place where his fingers used to be was always going to be strange to him. Or at least it felt that way. Did people ever adjust to losing part of themselves, no matter how small?

“I’m gonna go see my father tomorrow,” he said.

“By yourself?” Stan asked.

“Well, yeah. I don’t need a backup. We aren’t going to duel at dawn.”

“Does he know you’re coming?” Peggy asked.

Ginsberg nodded. “I thought it would go better if I planned it out. We aren’t — we can’t just go dropping in on each other.”

“Sounds smart,” Peggy said. She didn’t know what had happened between him and Morris but she must have guessed that it had been bad. She tilted the bottle in his direction but he waved her off. His head was starting to spin.

“I still have a key,” he said. “I never gave it back. Is that weird?”

“I don’t know,” Peggy said. “Maybe not. You might need it for an emergency.”

“I hope not,” he said.

“ _Chi si volta, e chi si gira, sempre a casa va finire_ ,” Stan said. He shook his head at their questioning expressions. His foot bumped up against Ginsberg’s under the table. “No matter where you go or where you turn, you’ll end up at home,” he translated. “Just something my grandmother used to say.”

 

 

 

Ginsberg woke up the next morning with a road crew inside of his head. “Fuck,” he hissed, and rolled over, pressing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets to try and drive the pain out. He blinked in the dusty sunlight of his room, spots all across his vision like the coat of a dalmatian dog.

He walked — or, possibly, crawled — into the living room and fell onto the sofa. Peggy was in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper.

“I’m dying,” he said.

“You’re overdramatic,” she replied. “Hangovers don’t kill you. They only feel like they will.”

He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. His stomach was churning and even the smell of her coffee from all the way across the room aggravated it. “Is that what this is?”

“Seriously?” she said, squinting at him. “You’ve never had a hangover before?” She went back to her coffee. “Stan was right. You are a child.”

“Did he leave already? I need to blame him for this.”

“He’s in bed. He likes to sleep in on Sundays, it reminds him of playing sick to avoid church.”

“I should go back to bed,” Ginsberg said. “And stay there until tomorrow comes. Today is not salvageable.”

“You can’t,” she said, slowly. “You have to go see your father.”

“ _Shit_ ,” he said, and bolted up from the couch. “I _completely_ forgot about that. What time is it? Am I late?”

“How could I possibly know?” she asked. “And it’s eight o’clock.”

“God,” he said, and staggered into the bathroom. He still had time. The hot water in Peggy’s shower lasted longer than it did at ho— at his father’s. He stayed in there maybe longer than he had to, letting the heat and the steam sink into his poor aching head.

He combed his wet hair back from his face because there wasn’t much else he could do with it. He needed a haircut. He needed a lot of things and a few solid weeks of good sleep was at the top of the list. The dark circles under his eyes weren’t from the hangover. Neither was the pallor or the heavy five o’clock shadow. Don Draper could have pulled it off. Michael Ginsberg could not. In the fogged over mirror he looked like a racoon.

Michael put on clean underwear and borrowed Stan’s bathrobe, which he was pretty sure would be fine with him, had he been among the living at the moment. He stuck his toothbrush in his mouth and opened the door to let the cool air in.

Peggy came with it, just as he was leaning over the sink and spitting out minty foam. “Jesus,” he said. “Warn a guy, would you? I coulda been undressed.”

“It’s my bathroom,” she said. “And why would you have the door open if you were naked?”

“I don’t know. People are stupid, sometimes.”

She cut around his side and groped for her own toothbrush. “Even you?” she asked, applying toothpaste.

“Especially me.”

He saw her eyes flick towards him in the mirror, but whatever rejoinder she had planned she dropped. When she approached the sink again he let her have it, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. He still needed to shave. He wanted to be presentable when he saw his father. He didn’t want Morris making assumptions. Or asking him to come home again.

Peggy put her toothbrush back in the cup. “That isn’t yours,” she said, twitching the collar of the robe.

“Should I take it _off_?”

“Oh sure,” she said, rummaging in the medicine cabinet for floss, “let’s get liberated.”

“Whatever reference that is, I don’t understand it.”

She laughed and shook her head. “Nothing. I’m just glad you’re getting comfortable, I guess.”

He shrugged. Now that she had mentioned it he did want to lose the bathrobe and felt its self-conscious weight with every movement, but there was no possibility of doing so with her still in the room. “I live here. Now.” He pulled at a loose thread on the sleeve before remembering that he shouldn’t be defacing someone else’s property. “Does Stan have an electric razor I could use?”

“Not lately,” she said. “He mostly trims his beard with scissors.”

“Oh,” Ginsberg said. He got up and started spreading shaving cream along his jaw. “Okay. I was only asking.” His own razor shivered between his fingers as he raised it to his skin. He held it with caution, expecting to mishandle it at any moment. Until they were gone he had never known how important those last two fingers were.

It did not help that Peggy was watching. In spite of himself he looked at her, or at her reflection, regarding him steadily. She had her lips pressed together in a thoughtful way. He closed his eyes, just for a tenth of a second, as the razor made contact. It bit into his cheek.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he hissed, and dropped it into the sink with a spasm of his suddenly nerveless fingers. There was a small streak of blood there already, mixing with water and swirling down the drain. He could feel the wet and the sting of the cut on his cheek, getting worse the longer he ignored it, but he didn’t want to look. He covered his face with his hands. They were trembling badly.

“Michael?” Peggy asked. She sounded very unsure, and her touch on his shoulder was feather light.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m such a fucking klutz. I can’t get the most basic possible shit right, not anymore.”

It was such a stupid thing to get upset over. He had cut himself shaving a million times, all the time when he was late for work, when he’d been up all night working on something and was foggy with exhaustion. But that was the problem. Nothing could exist within a normal context because he no longer had a normal. Every failure, no matter how small, no matter how insignificant, was fucking insurmountable. What could he do in the life that had been handed back to him if couldn’t even shave his face in the morning?

“Can you leave?” he asked. “Can we just pretend that you never observed this tantrum?”

He heard her run water and then tap the razor against the edge of the sink. “No,” she said. “But maybe I can help you out.”

Ginsberg opened his eyes. “How?”

She gestured to the toilet, the lid down and covered with a daisy-embossed cozy. He didn’t understand the point of those things. “Let me do it.”

“No.”

“Michael—”

“What if you cut my throat? You could never live with the guilt.”

Peggy rolled her eyes. “Don’t be an asshole. I shave two whole legs every day, which is a hell of a lot more ground than you have to cover. I know what I’m doing. Or I could wake Stan up and ask him to do it.”

“Absolutely not,” Ginsberg sputtered. “Do I need more witnesses?”

Peggy pointed again to the toilet. “Then sit,” she said, crisply, snapping her teeth around the ends of the words. It reminded him of the way she used to issue orders at work, so maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised to find himself doing as she instructed.

“This is crazy,” he complained.

“You’re still doing it,” she said. “What does that make you? And take care of that blood, for god’s sake. I get queasy.”

He took the square of toilet paper she handed him and tore off a corner to press against the cut. “You too, huh?”

“Well,” she admitted. “Probably not for the same reasons.” She tipped his chin back and looked him over with the calm and calculating eye of a butcher. And then she had to suppress a snort of laughter. “ _Stop_ it.”

“I wasn’t doing anything!”

“Except acting like a lamb being led to the slaughter.” She grinned at him and waved the razor around. “Don’t you _trust_ me, Michael?”

“No,” he said, but he let her put that damn razor to him anyway.

She curled her other hand around the back of his neck when he attempted to move away. It hadn’t been on purpose. It was a natural instinct to flinch back when a sharp object came at your face, wielded by someone else. “Shh,” she said. “Don’t squirm around or I might actually cut you. Just breathe. And relax.”

Peggy’s eyes were very blue, close up. Ginsberg was glad he’d brushed his teeth. He swallowed when she drew the razor along his skin for the first time, but she used a gentler technique than his own. He had a tendency to give himself razor burn.

“See?” she said, sounding pleased. Peggy did like to be right. “Told you.”

“Right,” he said, trying not to move much while he said it, the inside of his mouth funny and dry.

She was humming while she did her work. Not a real song, just a few notes back and forth or up and down. He closed his eyes, experiencing a curious mixture of tension and relief. He let her move him around like she wanted — tilting his head left so she could get at the corner of his jaw, or back so she could get under it. The rhythm of it was soothing. And then the whole shebang was over, gone between one blink and the next.

Peggy walked over to the sink to wash the razor off. He rubbed a palm over his newly smooth chin. The cut on his cheek itched, but it wasn’t as bad as he had feared.

“Thanks,” he said.

“No problem.” She splashed some water on her face so he helped out by dropping a towel over her head.

If Stan had walked in he wouldn’t have been able to explain anything they had been doing. It wasn’t that any of it was inappropriate, exactly. It was just inexplicable. He didn’t know he felt about that, except glad that Stan slept as heavily as Peggy had described.

“Before you get dressed,” she said, scrubbing her face on the terrycloth. “I have something for you.”

She went into the bedroom and came back with a couple of shirts and a light khaki colored jacket. His own clothes were threadbare and they had always been too big for him. Since losing weight they hung from his frame like a scarecrow’s rags. But he wasn’t sure Stan’s hand-me-downs would be better.

“Stan is somewhat wider than I am,” he started, but she shook her head.

“These belonged to Abe,” she said. “They’ve been in my closet forever. It’s not like he’ll show up looking for them tomorrow. Go on, take it. I need to free up space.”

He stopped by the mirror before he left. He was still visibly tired and pale and thin. But he resembled himself once more: clean-shaven, his hair as neat as it got, clothes that had encountered an iron at some point in their lifespans.

If he and Peggy were closer, he found himself thinking, he would have kissed her on the cheek before leaving. Because he couldn’t he lingered in the doorway. “Peggy,” he said.

“Go on,” she told him. “Get out of here.” And so he did.

 

 

 

He counted to five outside his father’s door in order to compose himself. It was supposed to work when you were angry; if he was lucky it would calm a case of the nerves, too. He straightened his shirt and wiped his feet on the carpet, and then he slid his key in the lock.

Morris came out of the kitchen as soon as the door opened. He had an apron on and flour all over his hands. “You’re early,” he said, throwing them up in the air. “I haven’t finished.”

“Finished what?” Ginsberg asked. The apartment was warm and filled with the smell of cooking. He could hear the egg timer going and something bubbling on the top of the stove.

“He’s been like this all morning,” said Izzy, from where he was ensconced in Morris’ armchair. Ginsberg could see the top of his bald head peeking over the newspaper he was holding. “Driving me crazy.” Izzy folded a page down in order to make his point more fully. “Six o’clock he was at my door. Izzy, he says. Have you got any eggs?”

“I didn’t trust the ones I had,” Morris said, turning to go back to his cooking. “Sometimes things go bad and you just don’t know.”

“They got a date printed on the side of the carton,” Izzy called after him.

Ginsberg almost put his keys up on the hanger by the door before catching himself and slipping them into his back pocket. “Hi, Izzy.”

“Hiya kid,” Izzy said. “How’s it shaking.”

“Not bad,” he said. “I live on the Upper West Side now. I guess Pop must’ve told you.”

“He keeps saying ‘roommate’,” Izzy said. “That actually mean girlfriend or what?”

“She’s a girl,” Ginsberg said. “Not a girlfriend. She used to be my boss, actually.”

“Then you’re a braver man than I am,” Izzy said. He rose from the chair to give Ginsberg a one-armed hug.

He stood with his hands on his hips and his horn-rimmed reading glasses sliding down his nose. Izzy was Bronx born and raised. He’d done a stint in the army during the Second World War and came home with a Purple Heart and a German bullet in his arm. He’d moved into their building only a couple days before Morris did, and he and Morris had briefly worked together in the Garment District sewing ladies crinolines and men’s trousers. But Morris had bad English in those days and got fired for misunderstanding some instruction or another. Izzy told the boss off right in the middle of the floor. “You know exactly what that man has been through,” he’d said. “So fuck you.” He got fired, too.

“Screw him,” he’d said, fuming in the parking lot afterwards, smoking a cigarette. “What can you expect from a goy?” He’d found a job at another textile factory. Morris went on to the deli. But they were friends ever after.

Ginsberg had always liked Izzy. He didn’t fuss over him the way Morris had. It was Izzy who gave him his first beer and taught him how to drive (Morris had tried but they kept getting in fights). And he had by accident given Ginsberg the best gift of all: privacy. His card game invitations lured Morris out of the apartment, often for the whole night. Ginsberg had revelled in the temporary unsupervised peace. If he’d had friends he even could have invited them over. Morris always made his return the following morning, slightly hungover and guilty and considerably lighter in wallet region.

The inside of the kitchen looked like the end of Yom Kippur. “What the _hell_ , Pop,” Ginsberg said before he could stop himself. His stomach rolled at the sight of all the food. There were eggs, beans, and toast. There were fresh sliced tomatoes and lox. There was a pot boiling on the stove and coffee in the maker. Ginsberg gestured to the cake cooling on the counter. “You make babka? Since when?”

“It’s an experiment,” Izzy interjected. “Watch out.”

Morris gave him a withering look. “It’s a cake. Any idiot can make cake.”

“I can’t make a cake,” Ginsberg said.

“He bought a cookbook,” Izzy said, solemnly. “Hey, Betty Crocker. Can I have some cake?”

“If you put the plates on the table.”

“Always putting me to work,” Izzy grumbled, but he started laying cutlery down. Ginsberg helped, pouring glasses of orange juice and getting out a jug of water.

There was no way he wanted to eat any of this. Some nice saltines, maybe. Cheerios if he was feeling very adventurous.

But Morris looked so hopeful, and he had clearly worked hard preparing the meal. Ginsberg imagined him getting up at four or five in the morning, trying to fill the empty hours with creation. Trying, in some small way, to make amends. He couldn’t reject that. What kind of son would he be if he did?

“The food looks great,” he said, and let his father fill his plate up.

 

 

 

He didn’t go back to Peggy’s right away. First he bought — and made use of — a bottle of antacids. And then he kept another appointment, one that made him more nervous than going to his father’s ever could.

The clinic looked like any other. He didn’t know why he felt like it would be different, more sinister. The last time he’d let the Army examine him it hadn’t gone well.

Dr. Pierce wore the usual white coat and had a swoop of salt and pepper hair that fell across his forehead. “Welcome to the VA,” he said, checking his clipboard. “Please ignore the bloodstains, we’re trying to clean that up. Now tell me where it hurts.”

Ginsberg exhaled. “Uh. Multiple places.”

“Just the answer I was expecting,” the doctor said, and crossed his arms over the clipboard, pressing it to his chest. “Care to be specific?”

“My leg is the worst problem,” said Ginsberg. “But there are — others.” He held up his hands, silently, and let them speak for himself.

“Okay,” said Dr. Pierce. He wrote something down. “And how are the nightmares?”

Ginsberg stared at him. “How did you know?”

The doctor smiled, almost sardonically. “Lucky guess. Tell me something. What are you hoping the outcome of this meeting will be?”

“What?”

“What is it you _want_ , Mr. Ginsberg? Not only now. Two years down the road. Or five,” he said. “Because I can give you pills and potions, but they only go so far. What comes after?”

“I haven’t thought about that.”

“I’ve been treating soldiers a long time,” he said. “It’s a question I’ve learned to ask. A very good friend of mine who was also a very good shrink of mine taught me how.”

“Why?”

“Because being able to imagine the future is what gives you one,” he said. “And it’s a skill that people lose in wartime. They drive it out of you boys in basic, I think.”

Ginsberg took a deep breath. “I don’t — I want it to stop,” he said. “I don’t want to be in pain. But I don’t want to only make it from day to day. I want to fit inside my life again.” To dream without screaming. To walk through the world and really see it, unfolding like a new rose all around him. More nights like last night, where he could laugh and relax and get sloppily drunk just for the hell of it. To not have to think about any of this, not at all, not ever again.

“Well,” the doctor said. “That’s certainly a start.”

 

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains some graphic discussion/description of war injuries and violence.

 

 

 

Ginsberg stood against the wall, one hand flat to the plaster. He was in his bare feet — the doctor told him not to wear shoes for the exercises, it would impact his flexibility — and he went up on his toes, as instructed. He could feel the damaged muscle in his calf strain every time he did. He held the position for a few seconds before dropping back down and starting over again.

There were others; stretches were he sat on the floor and pulled his toes back or rotated his ankle. He did them all until he started to feel sore, but that wasn’t so bad — in the beginning it had hurt badly enough to make sweat bead along his hairline. He’d been practicing and it _was_ getting better. The worst part was the massage, which he couldn’t do himself. His hands weren’t strong enough, or they weren’t now, with their intermittent tremor. He had exercises for that, too. It involved squeezing a tennis ball.

Stan had fun with that one. He’d appeared in Ginsberg’s doorway while Ginsberg worked one hand out and flipped the pages of a book with the other, and had waited patiently for him to look up.

“What?” Ginsberg asked.

“Playing with your balls, I see,” Stan said.

Ginsberg had closed the door on him. Now he went out into the living room because he needed someone to rub his damn leg. It was embarrassing to have to ask, but he’d been told it wasn’t a step he could skip. Something to do with scar tissue. And his shrink said he wasn’t supposed to feel bad about asking for help —

God, he was so sick of doctors already.

Stan was watching TV with the sound down low, laying on the couch. He sat up as Ginsberg approached. “Starting to think I should get tips for this,” he said. Not that Ginsberg had said anything, but he supposed the look on his face was eloquent enough.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “I could probably find —”

“Man, calm down,” said Stan. “I was only kidding. Roll your pant leg up.”

Ginsberg lay on his stomach because it was easier for Stan to get at the meat of his leg that way. It was an awkward position, pressing his face into the couch cushions, his calf extended across Stan’s lap. But it also meant he didn’t have to look, and his face was conveniently hidden from view.

The TV was playing Deal or No Deal. The contestant was trying to decide whether to trade up — or down — on a record player. She kept shaking her head to some internal monologue. It was a pretty nice record player.

“She should keep it,” Ginsberg opined.

“Nah, she should trade it,” Stan said. “She could get that anywhere.”

“Not for free.”

“You’d make a terrible gambler, Ginzo,” Stan told him. He pressed down hard with his thumbs and Ginsberg tensed his jaw against it, but the wave of discomfort faded quickly. “I would have thought you’d take more risks. You always did at work.”

“Did I?” Ginsberg said. That wasn’t how he remembered it. “I did what I was told, I thought.”

Stan laughed. “Seriously?” he said. “That was you doing what you were told?”

“Yes,” Ginsberg said, baffled. “I followed instructions. I gave the clients what they wanted. I was a good little worker bee. What part of that isn’t doing what I was told?”

“But you always argued,” Stan said. “You pushed your ideas, every single time.”

“I _better_ have,” said Ginsberg. “None of them would have gotten through if I hadn’t. Besides, arguing is fine. Everyone argues. It just means you have an opinion. The only reason anyone had a problem with it is because they were authoritarians. Don, Cutler — all those assholes.”

“I’ll drink to the last part, at least.”

“I’m surprised you kept on with it,” Ginsberg said. “Especially at McCann.”

“How d’you mean?”

“It’s not the most happening place,” Ginsberg said. “Not very modern. Or innovative.”

Stan snorted. “Oh, but they have Coca-Cola,” he said, and he sounded so bitter that Ginsberg twisted around to look at him. Stan shrugged, blowing it off, dropping his eyes to the work in front of him. “It’s a job, right? I’ve been in advertising for fifteen years. Started doing storyboarding for a guy who actually got to sign his name on it. I was freelance back then. It was supposed to be temporary. I wanted to be an illustrator for one of the big magazines, maybe do book covers or movie posters. But it was easier to stay at a paying gig. Besides, everything’s moving to photography now. Including me. No one gets everything they want.”

It sounded rehearsed. Like he had gone through the same spiel in his head, top to bottom, so often it was second nature to say it out loud. Which wasn’t the same as it sounding convincing.

“Not everything,” Ginsberg agreed. Not much at all, in some cases.

“It’s been awhile since I actually painted something,” said Stan, wistfully. “Might be about a year.”

“What’s stopping you?”

“Never could sell it,” he said. “So there’s not much point.”

“You should let Peggy do that part,” Ginsberg advised him. “She could sell fins to a fish.”

“Peggy’s got enough to do,” Stan said. It was seven and she still wasn’t home. Stan had headed out without her — it wasn’t unusual for them. They weren’t one of those couples that were attached at the hip.

Ginsberg rested his cheek against the cushion and watched the contestant lose her record player. She won a matchbox car instead. It was a red convertible but Ginsberg couldn’t have said what kind. He didn’t know cars.

“So how did it happen?” Stan asked, and if his hands hadn’t stopped moving at the end of his sentence Ginsberg might have misheard. He’d said the words so quietly. Ginsberg would have have said, how what happened? But he knew. He knew what Stan was asking.

“Think that’s enough for now,” he said, and sat up, pulling himself to the end of the sofa. He sat with his legs folded under him, the way he used to when he was a kid watching television on the living room floor, and chewed on his lip. His pant leg was still pushed up. He and Stan looked at one another.

“I’m sorry,” Stan said.

“Don’t,” said Ginsberg, sharply. “You’re allowed to ask a question. I’m not made of glass.”

Stan pushed his hair back from his face. “I thought it might — help. I don’t know.”

“I have one shrink already. I don’t need two.”

“I know.”

Ginsberg filled his lungs with air like he was about to go under the waterline. He felt like he needed it, all that oxygen pumping through his veins, so that he could get through the story. But he didn’t know how to start. What words he should pick. Which ones would make it come out right. He could tell Stan exactly where he had been when he was hurt. But Stan would only know it from a name on a map or on the news; he wouldn’t _see_ it, not the way Ginsberg did, every time he closed his eyes. He could describe the guys in his company, some of who made it out and some of whom didn’t. He could have told Stan which was which. About the families they left behind, the crumpled pictures of their children they kept in their pockets. But Ginsberg didn’t want to to be the bearer of the dead.

He could’ve talked about the bodies of civilians in the ditches by the side of the road. Or what it was like to be someone now who knew how to use a gun, who would never be able to forget how.

“You know what a bouncing betty is?” he asked.

Stan shook his head.

“It’s a bomb,” he said. “They pop up into the air and explode. About waist height. Someone stepped on one. Not me. I’d be dead if it was me. But I was close enough to get some of it. His name was Coop. Or Cooper, really. We just called him Coop.”

The second between Coop’s foot landing on that trigger and the explosion had been the longest of Ginsberg’s life. It was just long enough to realize what had happened. And he didn’t have to close his eyes to watch Coop fall all over again, or to the hear the sound he made when he went down. It hadn’t really been a scream. More like choking.

“It knocked me flat,” he said. “And took one of my fingers clean off. The other one was hanging by a piece of skin. So I —” He paused, greasy nausea building, but forced himself to keep going. “So I ripped it off.”

“ _Jesus_ ,” Stan said, gone gray, and in any other circumstance Ginsberg might have gloated at being able to gross him out that bad.

“They’re American bombs, by the way. Bouncing betties.”

“You got hit by an American bomb?” Stan asked.

“We put them all over the country,” Ginsberg said. “So not just me.”

Stan very much looked like he wanted to say something else. People usually did, at sad stories. The other day in the grocery store an old woman had noticed his limp, the hand that held the grocery list. She’d touched him on the arm. “Thank you for your service,” she’d said, and he’d fled from her, looking over his shoulder as if she would pursue him.

“It could have been worse,” Ginsberg said.

“Coulda been your pretty face,” Stan said.

“Could’ve been my nuts, I was thinking,” said Ginsberg. “They used to call those things ‘de-bollockers’ in the second world war. They were German first, those bombs. Of course the Americans adopted them. Just like all those Nazi scientists.”

“Christ,” Stan said. “I think I need a joint. You want to share one?”

“I still don’t smoke.”

“I’ll wear you down eventually,” Stan said, crossing the room to a dresser to get his stash. “It might help you sleep.”

“Do I keep you up?” Ginsberg asked. “When I’m wandering around?”

Stan held the joint between his teeth and touched the end of it to the flame of a match. “No. I sleep like I got knocked out in a cartoon. Little birds and stars around my head.”

“Yeah, Peggy said. Must be nice.”

“She likes it. She can turn on the lamp and I won’t even notice.” He sat back down on the couch and exhaled smoke with a slight cough. “She writes in the middle of the night all the time.”

“I used to do that.”

“Listen,” Stan said. “Don’t tell her what we’ve been talking about, okay?” He elaborated further when faced with Ginsberg’s uncomprehending expression. “Peggy’s afraid of blood. She doesn’t even like thinking about the subject.”

“And here I was gonna surprise her with it when she got home,” said Ginsberg. “What the _fuck_ , Stan.”

“Well,” said Stan. He spread his hands and then dropped them, the weed making him vague. “I’m only saying.”

 

 

By the time Peggy got home Stan was so mild he was lying down and Ginsberg was sitting by the television, flipping through the channels and trying to find something to drown out his stoned ramblings. Peggy came through the door with a large bag of something wonderful smelling in her arms and a smaller one tucked between her ribs and her elbow. The keys dangled from her fingers, clinking together as she tried to swing the door closed with her hip.

“Baby, you could’ve knocked,” Stan said, and took the bag of food over to the counter and starting to unpack it. It was Chinese food, the cartons printed with a pagoda.

Peggy sniffed the air. “I don’t have to ask what you’ve been doing,” she said. “Did you eat already?”

“No,” he said. “Ginzo wouldn’t cook and he wouldn’t let me near the stove.”

“You were in a purple haze,” Ginsberg said.

“Well,” Peggy said. “I figured we could eat it tomorrow if not today.” She looked up at Stan. “My apology for being so late, I guess.”

She looked guilty, but relaxed when Stan leaned over and kissed her. “Here,” she said after, seeming to remember Ginsberg was awkwardly present in the room, and walked into the living room to drop the smaller bag into his lap.

“What is it?”

“Open it, Michael,” she said. “It’s not booby trapped.”

“That’s what you say,” Ginsberg said. “But I know this is gonna be snakes in a can.”

It was a camera, small and sleek. Not a polaroid. “This looks expensive,” he said.

“Got it for free from work,” she said. “It’s a Canonet, We got their account. And Stan already has a camera. You were saying that you needed a hobby, so I figured…” She trailed off, unsure, and he felt bad. He didn’t mean to make her think he didn’t like her gift.

“It’s great,” he said. It also appeared complicated to his layman’s eye. “Stan can show me how to work it.”

“Do you think you’ll be up for walking around the park this weekend?” she asked. “I’ve been meaning to go before the leaves drop.”

It was autumn, which was the best season in New York, disconnected from the swelter of summer or the freeze of winter. He thought about the last time he had been in the park on that long and terrible day, his head spinning, his leg in agony. But that didn’t seem as close to him as it had been. It wasn’t nipping at his heels. He’d like to make a better memory, one with Peggy and Stan. Something that would make him smile when it drifted across the landscape of his mind.

“I’ll pack us a lunch,” he said.

He pulled a chair up while Stan dished up the food. Peggy put a plate in front of him, and someone filled a glass. He fiddled with the camera, hitting buttons, popping open the space where the film went in —

Peggy reached over and took it from his hands. “Not at the dinner table,” she said.

 

 

Stan went to bed early and Ginsberg and Peggy did the dishes. He offered to do them himself but she said that it was fine, she always came home wired from work and needed to wind down before she could sleep, anyway.

“I remember that,” he said. “If the day was good, but especially if it was bad. How’s it going, by the way?”

“This one was good,” she said. “Or at least productive.”

“So tell me about it,” he said, sinking his hands into the water.

She smacked him on his arm. “Michael, use gloves. There are knives in there.”

“Okay,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to lose another finger, right?” Peggy gave him an extremely no-nonsense look so he put them on, with some difficulty considering that his hands were already wet and the gloves were too small. The unfilled space of the last two fingers just sort of dangled there. It occurred to him that when winter hit he was going to have to tailor his gloves, because god did that look stupid. “So, how was your day, honey?”

“Well,” she said, and paused to try and blow a few stray strands of hair out of her face as he handed her a freshly washed glass. “Don’t tell Stan yet, but they might be putting me on Coke.”

“Holy _shit_ ,” Ginsberg said. “That’s huge. That’s the product of products. The Holy Grail.” He frowned. “Though I have never been clear on what exactly that is. It’s a big deal, is what I’m saying. Why am I not supposed to tell Stan?”

She shrugged. “Because I don’t know if they’ll be putting _him_ on Coke.”

“You think he’ll be jealous?”

“Wouldn’t you have been?” she asked.

“God yes,” he said, plainly. It would have eaten him up knowing he would never get a crack at an account like that. He wondered: if he’d been able to keep on in the industry, would that feeling of being young and hungry and left out have ever gone away? Would he ever have had access to the rooms of power the way Don did, the way Cutler did, all those guys with their pressed suits and six-figure checking accounts? Who would he have been, in five years or in ten?

“I’m not Stan, though,” he said.

“I’m trying to think of the right way to tell him,” she said. “Maybe I’ll take him out to dinner.”

“Don’t do that. He’ll think you’re trying to break up with him.”

“I’ll figure something out,” she said. “And I probably shouldn’t have told you first.”

“Probably.”

She suppressed a laugh. “Do you ever miss it?” she said. “You could go back, you know. Maybe once you feel better.”

He passed the last of the dishes over. It gave him a minute to consider his answer. Do I miss it, he thought, and then: what do I miss?

“I miss feeling like I was somebody,” he said. “Like I was good at something. Do you miss working with me?”

“No,” she said, immediately. He laughed before he could stop himself, pressing his dripping forearm against his face.

“Jesus, Peggy,” he said. “Be gentle with a guy, would you?”

“We get along at home,” she said. “We didn’t at work. That’s all I mean. We aren’t in competition now.”

“I never thought of you as the competition,” he said.

She looked at him over her dishtowel. The hair had drifted over her forehead again, almost touching her nose. Her eyebrows came together. “Was I not good enough?”

“You were my boss, you maniac,” he said. “I thought we were a team. Why did you think I was competing with you?”

“Everyone noticed you,” she said. “It was like suddenly I had to tap dance for attention. My ideas were old hat. I might as well have been invisible.”

“I had a lot of talent,” he said. “Also, I’m loud. You know they didn’t actually _like_ me, right? They wanted my work and they wanted to sign their name on the bottom of it. Don threatened to throw me in front of a cab one day. I bet he never said that to you.”

“He said other things,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about Don. Weren’t you bothered? I would be. If I’m going to be fired I’d want it to be because I did something. Not because I annoyed someone.”

“Work’s the last place I ever worried about being liked,” he said. “They don’t have to like you if they need you.”

“I could get you an interview,” she said. “At McCann, if you wanted one. Don’t talk about not needing to be liked during it.”

Ginsberg leaned back to look at her. She was serious, her mouth pinned up like she was nervous about his answer. But why would she be.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “We didn’t work so well together.”

“McCann is a huge company,” she said. “We might not be in the same room more than once a week. If that. And it’s not about what I want.”

He rolled the gloves down his wrists with a rubbery snap and threw them behind the faucet. He tried to imagine going back to the grindstone. Extended his damaged hand towards an account exec. The questions he would get asked. All those unfriendly faces looking down a table at him. It made him feel sick.

“No,” he said, and surrendered to the urge to tuck that loose strand of hair back behind her ear. “I’m going to do something else.”

Peggy exhaled. “Okay,” she said. “What?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m still deciding.”

 

 

The day of their picnic Central Park was awash in yellow and orange and red. The light had the peculiarly golden quality that it got in autumn, filtered through a canopy of leaves that looked like the contents of a jewelry box. The air was cool and sweet. It was a day for being grateful just to be alive.

Ginsberg wore the coat Peggy had given him, the one that used to belong to Abe. He knew he should go get more of his own things, either from his father’s or newly bought, but he liked what she had given him, he liked the coat’s deep pockets and the hood he could put up when it rained. It smelled a little like Peggy’s Chanel No. 5. She must have borrowed it from Abe, sometimes, or worn it after he left. He wore his blue cardigan under it, which he was starting to think of as his work sweater. They’d extended his shifts at the library. Some of the patrons knew his name, now. And he never had to wear a tie again if he didn’t want to.

“I like your hair like that,” Peggy said, hand-in-hand with Stan, as they walked along the path. Ginsberg was carrying the basket, swinging it on his arm. It belonged to Peggy’s neighbor; they didn’t have one. Peggy barely even cooked.

“Like what?” he asked. “This is just how it is.” He’d gotten a trim, but he wasn’t doing anything special with it.

“You look like a fluffy baby chick,” Stan interjected

“Thank you, Stan,” Ginsberg said. “Very helpful.”

“I try.”

“No, it’s better now,” she insisted. “You aren’t putting whatever gunk in it you used to.”

“ _Gunk_ ,” he said, offended. “I was trying to make it appropriate for work, Peggy. I don’t comment on your hairstyles.”

“The way yours looked I wouldn’t have listened,” she said.

His jaw dropped and Stan laughed so loudly that a couple pushing a baby carriage ten feet over looked across at them. “Ow,” Ginsberg said. He put a hand on his chest. “Ow, Peggy. That really hurts.”

“Sorry,” she said, with a grin that made her apology a lie.

“That was very rude of you.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“It was,” he said. “I think I should go home, maybe.” He took half a step from the path before she caught him and pulled him back, tucking her arm in the crook of his. He didn’t mind. He kind of liked it.

“You stay right there,” she said.

They spread the blanket in the shadow of a great oak and had their lunch. Ginsberg lay on his back after it was done and looked into the sky until his eyes hurt. He didn’t want to close them. He wanted to commit every single thing to memory; the way Peggy’s hair looked in the sunlight, the way Stan’s fingers threaded through it. The weight of them next to him. He wanted to be able to call it up, whenever he needed to.

 

 

 

 


End file.
